Background
Elisabet Ney was born on January 26, 1833 in Münster, Westphalia (now Germany). At an early age she was seized with a desire to become a sculptor and worked in the atelier of her father, a well-known sculptor of ecclesiastical works.
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Elisabet Ney
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also known as
Franzisca Bernardina Wilhelmina Elisabeth
Education
After attending the schools of her native town, Elisabet determined, as a seventeen-year-old girl, to go to Berlin to study sculpture under the great master, Christian Daniel Rauch. For two years her parents steadfastly opposed her purpose but finally compromised in permitting her to attend the Academy of Fine Arts at Munich. After two years in the academy at Munich, during which time her brilliant work made her a marked student, she transferred in 1855 to Berlin, where Rauch accepted her as a student. With him she continued until his death two years later.
Career
In 1856 Ney exhibited her work at the Berlin Exposition and gained warm praise. After the death of Rauch she took over some of his uncompleted commissions.
She became a warm friend of the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, and made busts of them.
During the years 1859-60 she spent several months in Hanover, engaged in making a colossal bust of King George V of Hanover. At this time, Friedrich Kaulbach made a famous portrait of her, and this, with her bust of the King, is now one of the most striking objects in the Museum of the province of Hanover.
In 1860 Elisabet Ney returned to her native town and remained there for three years, engaged in numerous works, largely busts and statues of historical personages of the province. As a result, Münster possesses the best array of her early work in public and private collections.
During the summer of 1863 she made two visits to England.
She returned to Munich early in 1865. After a few weeks, she left with her husband for Mentone and Rome and made a bust of Garibaldi during a year's sojourn in Italy.
She returned with Montgomery to Munich in the spring of 1867 and rode the crest of a wave of unprecedented popularity.
Among the many commissions that she received during the year were one from King Wilhelm I of Prussia for a bust of Bismarck, and busts of the chemists Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wohler for the Polytechnicum of Munich.
In 1869 King Ludwig II of Bavaria had her make a statue of himself. She also received commissions for two classical figures to be cast in bronze for the Polytechnicum in Munich.
She determined to leave Europe and go to America, where her ideas might be "free, " and so, at the end of December 1870, accompanied by Montgomery and a faithful servant, "Cencie, " she left Munich. She made one of a company of free spirits who formed a colony at Thomasville, Georgia. The colony later disintegrated and at the end of 1872 Ney and Montgomery traveled to Texas. Elisabet's indomitable and stiff-necked pride would not allow her to admit failure to her European friends, and hence she accepted banishment from cultured Europe and its artistic associations. In March 1873 Montgomery purchased a plantation, "Liendo, " near Hempstead, Texas.
For twenty years the sculptress was here isolated from all contact with the artistic world.
In 1892, after many years of deprivation, in furtherance of her lifelong, insatiable hunger for recognition as a sculptor, she moved to Austin, the capital of Texas. There, with the aid of Montgomery, she built a studio (now the "Elisabet Ney Museum").
About this time she received a commission to make statues of Stephen F. Austin and Samuel Houston for the Texas Building at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. When state-wide recognition of her gifts as a sculptor followed upon the completion of these statues, she executed a number of works, chiefly busts of Texans prominent in the history of the state.
Three visits to Germany followed during the next ten years. Her first (1895) was in the nature of a triumphal return. Subsequent visits (1902, 1903) saw the completion of her most ambitious works, "Prometheus Bound" (now in the Bavarian royal castle at Linderhof) and the Albert Sidney Johnston Memorial, now in the state cemetery at Austin, Texas.
The isolation of her twenty years at "Liendo, " and her semi-isolation for another fifteen years at Austin, prevented the growth to be expected in one of her genius. Without constant friendly criticism her work was destined to show qualities of unevenness.
Achievements
Views
Quotations: "Women are fools to be bothered with housework. Look at me; I sleep in a hammock which requires no making up. I break an egg and sip it raw. I make lemonade in a glass, and then rinse it, and my housework is done for the day. "
Personality
Elisabet's extraordinary gifts, her unusual beauty, and her indomitable carried her to heights of popularity.
Elisabet Ney was marked by an independence of spirit that broke everything to her will; this was especially true of her treatment of her husband and her surviving son. She possessed a haughtiness and uncalculating ambition that surmounted all personal and material obstacles, and this, together with a pride that could not bend, conspired to rob her of opportunities by means of which she might have risen to world-wide acclaim as a sculptor.
Quotes from others about the person
"She is one of the best equipped of women sculptors. Her sketches and compositions are admirable, as are her virile, simply handled heads of the forceful sons of Texas. The details of the features are epitomized with great discrimination and with an easy mastery of form which is unknown to the majority of our sculptors. " (Lorado Taft)
Connections
On November 17, 1863, she married Edmund Duncan Montgomery, who was destined to exert a very great influence upon her development.
Although Elisabet Ney had been legally married to Montgomery in the office of the British consul at Madeira, she always, by an incomprehensible whim of hers, denied her marriage, even to her parents and closest friends, in the face of subsequent social ostracism in America and Europe.
She bore two children, one of whom died.
References
- Elisabet Ney, Sculptor (Classic Reprint)
- Two Romantics and Their Ideal Life; Elisabet Ney, Sculptor; Edmund Montgomery, Philosopher
- Elisabet Ney: Sculptor of American Heroes
- The Art of the Woman: The Life and Work of Elisabet Ney (Women in Texas History Series, sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation)
- Marble Dust: The Life of Elisabet Ney : An Interpretation
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Born
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Died
June 29, 1907 (aged 74) -
Nationality
American