Born in Mƒnster, Westphalia (now Germany), on January 26, 1833, Franzisca Bernadina Wilhelmina Elisabeth Ney was the daughter of a stonecutter from whom she absorbed artistic ambitions. After attending Catholic schools and studying drawing privately in her home city, she entered, over her parents╒ misgivings, the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1855 she went to Berlin to study with Christian Daniel Rauch, through whom she was introduced to the literate and cultural leaders of that city. She exhibited her work successfully at the Berlin Exposition of 1856, and on the death of Rauch in 1857 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 Mƒnster working on a number of busts and statues she was married in November 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 feminist beliefs. They lived for a time in Madeira and then in Rome, where she prevailed upon Garibaldi to sit for a bust. In Rome she also did a bust of Bismarck on commission from Wilhelm I of Prussia, and she executed a colossal ╥Prometheus Bound.╙ Her popularity grew rapidly. In late 1867 she returned to Munich as court sculptor to Ludwig 11 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 emigrate to the United States. They settled first in Thomasville, Georgia, where they hoped to establish a colony of like-minded ╥enlightened╙ ÄmigrÄs, but in 1873 they settled on Liendo Plantation near Hempstead, some 40 miles from Houston, Texas. Elisabet Ney virtually abandoned sculpture for nearly 20 years to devote herself to the task of rearing their son to be a genius in her own mold; her efforts proved self-defeating.
In 1890 Ney again turned to her art with commissions for statues of Stephen F. Austin and Samuel 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. She made several statues of prominent Texans: two more of Houston, for the state capitol and for Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol; two of Austin for similar placement; an Albert Sidney Johnston for the Texas State Cemetery; and several of former governors and senators. Her last major private work was a statue of Lady Macbeth. It is generally conceded that the brilliant career she early seemed destined for was thwarted largely by her own unbending will. She died in Austin, Texas, on June 29, 1907.
