NEY, ELISABET

born Jan. 26, 1833, Mnster, Westphalia, Prussia [now in Germany] died June 29, 1907, Austin, Texas, U.S. in full Franzisca Bernadina Wilhelmina Elisabeth Ney sculptor, remembered for her statues and busts of European and Texas personages of the mid- to late 19th century. Ney was the daughter of a stonecutter, and from him she absorbed artistic ambitions. She studied drawing privately in her home city of Mnster and at the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1855 she went to Berlin to study with the noted sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch, through whom she was introduced to the literati and cultural leaders of that city. Ney exhibited her work successfully at the Berlin Exposition of 1856, and on the death of Rauch the following year she took over some of his unfinished commissions. Busts of Arthur Schopenhauer, a personal friend, and of King George V of Hanover established her fame. After three years in Mnster working on a number of busts and statues, she was married in 1863 to Edmund Duncan Montgomery, whom she had met as a student in Munich. She retained her own name (she had by then dropped the h from Elisabeth) and for some years often denied she was married out of a sense that marriage somehow contradicted her stoutly held feminist beliefs. Ney and her husband lived for a time in Madeira and then in Rome, where she prevailed upon the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi to sit for a bust. In Rome she also did a bust of Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck on commission from Wilhelm I of Prussia, and she executed a colossal Prometheus Bound. In late 1867 she returned to Munich as court sculptor to Ludwig II of Bavaria, by whom she and Montgomery were installed in a villa. The apparent irregularity of their living together, along with some possible involvement in intrigue with Bismarck, forced them to leave Bavaria in 1870. They chose to immigrate to the United States, settling first in Thomasville, Georgia, where they hoped to establish a colony of like-minded enlightened migrs, but in 1873 they settled on Liendo Plantation near Hempstead, some 40 miles (64 km) from Houston, Texas. Ney virtually abandoned sculpture for nearly 20 years to devote herself to the task of rearing their son. Ney again turned to her art in 1890, with commissions for statues of Texas patriots Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston to be exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago three years later. In 1891 she opened a studio in Austin, Texas, where she was able to bring her forceful personality and attractive unconventionality to bear on prominent Texans to win further commissions, primarily of state political figures. Her last major private work was a statue of Lady Macbeth.