The Art of the Woman : The Life and Work of Elisabet Ney 0803214383, 9781623494247, 9781623494254

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Women in the West Series Editors Sandra L. Myres University of Texas at Arlington Elliott West University of Arkansas Julie Roy Jeffrey Goucher College

Elisabet Ney wearing her studio costume, about 1896. Courtesy Austin History Center.

University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London

Emily Fourmy Cutrer

T^e Art of tljeWoman The Life and Work of Elisabet Ney

Copyright © 1988, University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cutrer, Emily Fourmy, 1952The art of the woman. (Women in the West) Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Texas at Austin. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Ney, Elisabet, 1833-1907. Germany - Biography. Biography.

I. Title.

NB588.N4C88

1988

2. Sculptors -

3. Sculptors - Texas II. Series. 73o'.92'4 [B]

ISBN 0-8032-1438-3 (alkaline paper)

87-19077

FOR T O M , KATE, AND W I L L

Contents

LIST OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S , ix PREFACE, xi A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S , xiii 1

A REBELLIOUS PERSONALITY, I

2

THE GREAT MEN OF THE W O R L D , 2 0

3

A R E V O L U T I O N A R Y AND A K I N G , 4 1

4

THE LOG CASTLE, 7 1

5

" G O N E TO T E X A S , " 89

6

S C U L P T U R E ON THE F R O N T I E R , 1 1 2

7

THE GREATEST OF THE W I L D M E N , 1 2 8

8

A M O N G THE B U S H M E N , 1 4 3

9

FOR BRAVE AND G O O D D E E D S , 1 6 0

10

THE ART OF THE W O M E N , 1 7 6

11

SELF-PORTRAIT, 197 EPILOGUE, 221 NOTES, 225 B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L ESSAY, 2 5 3 INDEX, 263

illustrations

Frontispiece, Elisabet Ney, ii i

Ney, Bride Neill Taylor, 3

2

Edmund Montgomery, 10

3

Ney, Saint Sebastian, 16

4

Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Saint Sebastian, 17

5

Ney, Jacob Grimm, 19

6

Photograph of Ney's bust of Schopenhauer, 26

7

Friedrich Kaulbach, Uartiste, 28

8

Ney, Walter von Plattenberg, 31

9

Ney, Justus Moser, 3 2

10

Ney, Franz von Furstenberg, 33

11

Ney, Giuseppe Garibaldi (marble bust), 46

12

Ercole Rosa, Giuseppe Garibaldi, 48

13

Ney, Giuseppe Garibaldi (bronze statuette), 49

14

Ney, Otto von Bismarck, 52

15

Ney, Friedrich Wohler, 55

16

Ney, Ludwig II, 69

17

Ney, Sursum or Genii of Mankind,

77

18

Ney, Prometheus Bound, 78

19

Ney, Prometheus Bound, 79

20

Liendo Plantation, 91

21

Lome Ney Montgomery, 99

22

Ney, Lome Ney Montgomery The Young Violinist, 101

23

Ney, Oraw Roberts, 115

24

Hyde Park, 127

25

Formosa, 130

26

Ney, &*ra Houston,

27

Ney, Stephen F. Austin, 140

28

Texas state capitol and grounds, 145

29

An afternoon at Formosa, 156

30

Ney, William Jennings Bryan, 186

31

Ney in front of the Albert Sidney Johnston memorial, 190

32

Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin in the Texas state capitol, 194

33

Tourists in the Texas state capitol, 195

34

Ney, Elisabet Ney, 202

35

Ney, Sam Houston,

36

Ney, Lady Macbeth, 215

37

Ney, Lady Macbeth, detail, 216

38

Ney, Lady Macbeth, detail, 217

39

Ney, Lady Macbeth, detail, 218

or

134

203

Preface

J ^ ^ l i s a b e t Ney belongs to Texas legend. Both during her lifetime and afterward, her name has given rise to all kinds of stories, some completely false, others based in truth, that have been perpetuated by word of mouth and in print. Although Ney herself was well aware of the "medley of gossiping, garbled tales" that circulated about her while she was living, she undoubtedly would have been stunned by the number and variety of stories that have appeared since her death in 1907. During the past eight decades, the sculptor's life has inspired at least three biographical novels, four one-woman plays, and countless articles in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines. The public's fascination with this German-American woman stems in large part from the persona one recent book attributes to her. "Elisabet Ney," as Charlotte Streiffer Rubinstein introduces her in American Women Artists, "was an exotic and romantic figure in the history of American sculpture."1 As a brief sketch of her life reveals, she was also an exotic and romantic figure in European and Texas society. Born in Westphalia in 183 3, she lived through the turbulent period of Germany's unification and, as a professional sculptor, knew many of that country's most important political and intellectual leaders. In 1871 she left Europe in a seemingly abrupt fashion and came to America. Rather than making her home among other artists and intellectuals in the Northeast she settled in the still geographically and culturally remote state of Texas. There she lived an isolated existence for nearly twenty years until 1892, when she emerged from the hinterlands and established a studio in Austin, the state's capital, and resumed a career that lasted until her death. During her years in America, Ney was a very visible personality. She dressed and styled her hair without regard to current fashion. Her homes

XI

were conspicuously different from those of her neighbors, and she frequently spoke out on public issues using terms and ideas that were foreign to her audience. Moreover, Ney was aloof, usually refusing to explain or justify her habits or actions. Others therefore supplied their own—frequently inaccurate— interpretations. Through the years these stories have been the basis of much of the Elisabet Ney legend, and they continue to be heard in oral tradition and seen in print. She has been termed everything from a promiscuous baby burner and witch in the most lurid tales to a trailblazing feminist and artiste in more sympathetic accounts. When properly analyzed, these interpretations are useful for what they disclose about the insecurities and needs of Ney's audience. Taken alone, as they generally have been, they obscure important themes in the sculptor's life and work. As a more complete examination of written documents and material artifacts reveals, Elisabet Ney is significant as more than an example of Texas folklore and an interesting and eccentric personality. Her story is that of both a woman and a European artist in a society just emerging from its frontier beginnings. As such, it illuminates the role both groups have played in this nation's artistic development, and it provides a case study of the interaction between the European intellectual and the American frontier.

xn

Acknowled0nients

. J L ^ i k e all authors, I have incurred a number of debts. Among the most important is undoubtedly the one I owe the American Civilization graduate program at the University of Texas. I am certainly not the first student to acknowledge an intellectual debt to its first director, William H. Goetzmann, for the breadth, depth, and spirit of his scholarship have been an inspiration to those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and study with him. Besides serving as a mentor, Professor Goetzmann has also been a very good friend whose unfailing encouragement has often kept me going. Robert M. Crunden, the program's current director, has likewise stimulated my thought, encouraged my work, and provided a sympathetic ear (not to mention a swift kick when I needed one). I am more grateful to both of them than I can adequately acknowledge. I am also thankful for the friendship and help of William Stott and Jeffrey Meikle, both of whom read this book when it was a dissertation and made numerous important suggestions. Likewise, my fellow graduate student and friend, Margaret M. Caffrey, read the entire manuscript and offered welcome advice and encouragement. Gerald Hauck, Tinky Weisblatt, and Jennifer Scalora, also of the American Civilization program, provided much assistance. I began my research on Elisabet Ney with a grant from the Texas Committee for the Humanities that was administered by the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures. James Veninga and Robert O'Connor of the TCH and John Davis and Linda Lee, both formerly of the ITC, were all very helpful. The Rockefeller Foundation also provided support for my research with grants administered by the Art History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Numerous institutions and individuals provided help far beyond the call

xin

of duty. I would especially like to acknowledge the assistance of Jim Fisher, Lyn Lichtenfels, and Willie Nunn of the Elisabet Ney Museum, who have been unfailingly patient, helpful, and encouraging throughout this project. Kathleen Gee of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas also shared her time and knowledge. In addition, Ellen Brown of the Texas Collection at Baylor University, Jane Kenamore at the Rosenberg Library in Galveston, Audrey Bateman and her staff at the Austin History Center, and Ralph Elder and William Richter at the Barker Texas History Center, the University of Texas at Austin, have been of much assistance. Don E. Carleton, director of the Barker Center, read the manuscript at a time when he had much better things to do. I am especially grateful to the individuals who allowed me to use their private collections of Ney material: Mrs. Ralph Bickler, J. P. Bryan, Helen Frantz, and Martha Shaw. The following people provided insights and leads that were very helpful: Cynthia Brandimarte, Francine Carraro, Suzanne Comer, Shelli Booth Fowler, William Green, Elizabeth John, Glen Lich, Peter Maxson, Marlene Park, Frank Schleicher, Megan Seaholm, Ron Tyler, Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, and Marie Weir. Eric Ritter and Paul Widergren were able and enthusiastic translators. James Patrick McGuire of the Institute of Texan Cultures was a valuable aid in securing sources and a welcome sounding board at the early stages of my research. Peter Jelavich and Dagmar Barnouw of the University of Texas at Austin both gave the manuscript close critical readings, and I am very grateful for their suggestions. Gail Minault and Rino Pizzi, also of the University of Texas, graciously went out of their ways to help me procure illustrations from European museums, and Tim Davis spent many hours in the Ney Museum and the darkroom to produce his outstanding photographs of Ney's sculpture. Sandra L. Myres of the University of Texas at Arlington has been an important friend, reader, and inspiration, and I am most appreciative of her including this book in the Women in the West series of the University of Nebraska Press. In addition to the traditional scholarly debts, I also owe personal ones to my friends Carmen Mireles, Mary Anne Torrence, Holly Nitch and the late Leo Nitch, Nancy Ward, Sheryl Cox, and Laura Smitherman. The loving care they gave my children allowed me the time and peace of mind I needed to complete this book. I am deeply grateful to them as well as to my mother-in-law Wilkie Cudd, who always came through with help on the home front when I needed it. She and my parents, James and Mary Louise Fourmy, have been unfailing sources of support. Finally, my husband, Tom, has helped in more ways than I could possi-

xiv

bly list. Most important, however, he and my children, Kate and Will, have been my inspiration and encouragement. The first sentence my daughter wrote, "My mommy has a dissertation," hung over my desk and is now one of the few things in her baby book. I hope she, as well as her father and brother, will accept this book as some small recompense for what they have had to live with and do without.

Acknowledgments

xv

i. A Rebellious Versonalhy

w w hatever is said about one," Elisabet Ney wrote in 1906, near the end of her remarkable life, "I abhor all personalities. These are first generally misrepresentations and second take away from the dignity of [one's] work."1 No more ironic words could have come from Ney's pen: throughout her life, she had often worked quite consciously to develop a "personality" or "image." A personality, as she correctly assessed the issue, could have its negative aspects, and the lurid, sensational side of Ney's image certainly did detract from serious appraisal of her work as a sculptor. But a personality could also have its positive effects, and Ney was not reluctant to enjoy and use to her advantage the benefits of notoriety. Ney's arrival in Austin was one occasion when celebrity served her well. On 3 July 1892, the leading newspaper of Texas's capital, the Austin Daily Statesman, announced the following: "Austin to Secure the Celebrated Sculptress, Miss Ney." The headlines that thus heralded her decision to reside in Austin are themselves significant, for they contain an important key to the image Ney would cultivate in her adopted home. As the headline implied, Elisabet Ney did not have to make her reputation. She was already famous.2 The story that accompanied the headlines undoubtedly impressed the citizens of Austin. Quoting an article published in Germany's Ueber Land und Meet in the 1880s, the Statesman claimed that "among the plastic artists of our age Elisabet Ney certainly occupies one of the most prominent places," and it listed numerous well-known personalities, among them statesmen, scientists, and artists, whom she had sculpted in Europe. "That a woman of such accomplishments and reputation as Elisabet Ney," it concluded, "should after traveling both continents, determine to make her home in Austin is indeed a thing of which our people should be

1

proud." 3 The idea that Ney had enjoyed a brilliant European career gave her a certain legitimacy and authority; the town's leading paper, at least, believed the people were lucky to have her in their midst. Ney's glamorous and distinguished past became a part of the image she cultivated, and perhaps exploited, during her next fifteen years in Austin: it was something both the sculptor and her supporters could use to justify her life-style and her work. Just how accurate a picture Ney's Austin friends and supporters had of her previous life, however, is open to question. Because very little of her background can be documented, myth, hearsay, and most important, the sculptor's own flair for self-dramatization obscure the story of her life. In 1904, for example, a Washington Post reporter asked Ney if she "came of a family of artists." Disregarding her father's occupation as a stonecarver, Ney replied, "I came from a race of revolutionaries."4 The answer was typical. Although Ney undoubtedly inherited part of her artistic inclination and skill from her father, she preferred to claim as her birthright his connection with the hero of the French Revolution, Napoleon's "bravest of the brave," Marshal Michel Ney. Not content that the marshal was her grandfather's cousin, the sculptor assumed a closer kinship. In both public and private statements, Ney claimed that the French marshal was her granduncle, and most contemporary articles also mentioned the relationship. Though seldom explicit, these statements suggested that the two redheads had similar strong-willed and courageous personalities. Just as the prince of Moscow had gained fame throughout Europe for his bravery in battle, so his descendant, through determination, had conquered the Continent with her art. Or so she would have had people believe.5 Nowhere is Ney's portrayal of herself as a daring rebel more blatant than in the "authorized" biography by her Austin friend and supporter Bride Neill Taylor. A journalist and civic leader, Taylor first published her book-length study of Ney in 1916, nine years after her subject's death. Elisabet Ney: Sculptor, however, is based on the stories Ney told Taylor in 1897. These stories first appeared in an article Taylor wrote that same year for Texas Magazine, a short-lived journal published by an enterprising University of Texas student, R. E. McCleary. Ney herself had welcomed the idea of the biographical sketch when McCleary proposed it, because, according to Taylor, she "saw in it an opportunity of getting before the public something authentic as an answer to the medley of gossiping garbled tales being circulated about her." The only stipulation Ney made was that her friend Taylor should write the article, and when Taylor agreed, she gladly provided her friend with the "facts about her life and work which might otherwise never have been secured (fig. i)." 6

2

Figure i. Ney, Bride Neill Taylor, about 1900. Plaster, diameter 8 inches. Courtesy Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas. Photo by Tim Davis. During the last years of her life, Ney made several portrait medallions like this as gifts to close friends. When, several years after the sculptor's death, Ney's supporters felt the need for a full-length biography, they called upon Taylor to continue her work. Using Ney's "facts" as the foundation of her book, Taylor expanded the original article using what she called "living human documentation consisting of the word-of-mouth testimony of a group of Miss Ney's friends." In her introduction, she lists some twenty-eight people who knew Elisabet Ney well during her years in Texas and whom Taylor believed were reliable witnesses. Because of the varying natures of their involvement with Ney, each gave a "different line of insight into the facts." Despite the differing viewpoints, what was remarkable to Taylor was that "there was a real agreement among us all as to the understanding of the events of Miss Ney's life and of the qualities of her character." Thus, drawing on these observations by friends and co-workers, Taylor produced a "composite"

A Rebellious Personality

3

picture of what Ney said about herself and what her friends believed was true. 7 According to this portrait, New was from early childhood a determined rebel. Records show that she was born on 26 January 1833 in Miinster, Westphalia, to Johann Adam and Anna Elisabeth Wernze Ney and was baptized Franzisca Bernadina Wilhelmina Elisabeth in Saint Martin's Parish. Her father was a stonecarver who, as his will reveals, made a comfortable living fashioning statuary for local churches and gravestones for the cemeteries. Her mother, apparently, was a typical German housewife who spent her time caring for her two children, Elisabet and an older brother Frederick. Any other information about Ney's childhood was subject to the sculptor's own imagination and interpretation. As she told Bride Taylor, she never conformed to the expectations of her hometown. Although it was the capital of Westphalia, Miinster was not much different in the 1830s and 1840s from what it had been several centuries before. Its primarily Catholic population adhered to traditional social and religious mores, and opportunities for change were limited for all the lower segments of society but particularly, Ney felt, for women.8 In this characterization of her birthplace Ney, no doubt, was at least partially correct. Although opportunities were few for women everywhere in the nineteenth century, the situation was probably worse in Germany than elsewhere in western Europe or the United States. Women had no civil rights, and religious and social pressures as well as civil law maintained male dominance in the state, society, and the home. Although elementary education was generally available, few secondary schools comparable to those in France, England, or America existed for women until well into the twentieth century.9 After learning to read and write, German girls were expected to acquire the domestic skills appropriate to their social position. Such a career did not interest the young Ney. According to her own testimony, she was dissatisfied with the "sweet, uneventful life of a German hausfrau" and longed for a wider sphere.10 Establishing a position in the arts was one of the few nondomestic roles available for nineteenth-century women such as Ney, and the ambitious young girl had several examples available in her native Miinster of women who had thus defied convention. One, Princess Amalia von Gallatzin, daughter of a noble Prussian family and wife of a Russian diplomat, had frequented intellectual circles in Paris and The Hague before making her home near Miinster. There she won respect not so much for her own work in education as for the salon of artists and intellectuals who gathered at her estate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The other

4

example, Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff, was a Westphalian noblewoman who studied with her brother's tutors, developed her talents in music and acting, and achieved fame in 1842, when Ney was nine years old, with the publication of a widely read novel, The Book of the Jew. During the 1840s a number of her poems appeared in print, and by her death in 1850 von Droste-Hiilshoff was being acclaimed as Germany's greatest woman poet. 1 1 Both women were cultural heroes in Munster, widely talked about and respected, and Ney undoubtedly knew about them. Her greatest inspiration, however, she claimed came from history and legend rather than her own time and place. When Ney was a small child, she later recounted, her mother, not realizing what ideas she was giving her daughter, often told her the story of Sabina von Steinbach. Von Steinbach, as the story went, worked side by side with her father on the sculptural decoration of Strasbourg cathedral in the early fourteenth century, and when her father died she completed the work on the cathedral's south portal. Her statue of Saint John holds a scroll that states in Latin, "Thanks be to the holy piety of this woman, Sabina, who from this hard stone gave me form." It was the lesson in piety that interested Ney's mother, but the idea that a girl could achieve fame as a stonecarver intrigued the young Elisabet and, as she remembered many years later, gave a focus to her ambitions. 1 2 Because the story of Sabina von Steinbach working with her father so intrigued Ney, one might assume, as several of Ney's biographers have done, that the young Elisabet spent many hours in her own father's stoneyard learning from him and helping him. 1 3 Nowhere does she mention passing her time that way, however. Although she claimed to be his "chosen companion" and admired and imitated his taste for unconventional dress, she apparently never gave him any credit for helping her find her vocation. In fact, she claimed to Bride Taylor that her parents were totally surprised when she announced, as a teenager, that she intended to be a sculptor and wanted to study in Berlin. They thought her goal not only preposterous but, as Ney remembered, indecent and immoral as well: she would have to leave home and study under men and with boys in a Protestant city. Ney finally overcame their objections, however, and the story she told of how she did so further enhanced her image as a determined and rebellious child. 14 "If you do not let me go," Ney supposedly told her mother, "I will die." She then began a hunger strike that, the believing Bride Taylor reported, "went on for weeks." After "she grew thin and pale" and her mother feared "she would really die," the frightened parents called in the bishop of

A Rebellious Personality

5

Miinster. Bishop Miiller, Ney recalled, pressed her to give up her dreams, but finally he "recognized an insurmountable obstacle when he came up against it." Thus he advised her parents to relent and urged a compromise. She could leave home to study sculpture, but in Catholic Munich rather than Protestant Berlin. If she intended to ignore the expectations of her community, she would at least not abandon its faith. Thus with the promise to her parents that she would live with family friends and not ignore her Catholic upbringing, Ney left Miinster for Munich in 1852. 1 5 Winning permission from her parents to leave home and study sculpture was only half of Ney's battle. Once in Munich, she had to gain admission to the art academy, and in the mid-nineteenth century that was at least as difficult a task. Though fewer than ten European women were practicing artists in the fifteenth century, by the nineteenth century their numbers had greatly expanded, and they were no longer especially unusual. In the exclusive Paris Salon Exhibition of 1830, for example, 178 women exhibited their work. Although the number of women artists had increased dramatically from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, much of the work was in areas considered essentially feminine. "Male genius has nothing to fear from female taste," declared the French art critic Leon Legrange in i 8 6 0 , echoing the age's conventional wisdom: Let men conceive of great architectural projects, monumental sculpture, and the most elevated form of painting. . . . In a word let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art. Let women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, miniatures. Or the painting of flowers. . . . To women above all falls the practice of graphic arts, those painstaking arts which correspond so well to the role of abnegation and devotion which the honest woman happily fills here on earth. 1 6 One reason women occupied themselves with what Legrange and his contemporaries considered minor arts or mere crafts was that the training necessary for "great art" was generally unavailable to them. Aspiring women painters and sculptors suffered from the belief that the study of nudes, one of the main features of academic training, was indecent for women. The hopeful sculptress, however, faced another disadvantage: modeling large figures and carving stone blocks were considered indelicate and beyond her physical strength. Although by the mid-nineteenth century,

6

thanks to technical advances such as the pointing machine, few sculptors actually cut their own stone, they were still at least in theory expected to be able to do so. Because of these prejudices, among others, European art academies generally refused to admit women until attitudes began to change in the late nineteenth century. With few exceptions, women had to rely upon self-instruction, the teaching of women's academies usually devoted to "feminine" arts, or the guidance of male mentors, often fathers or husbands, who happened to take an interest in their work. Elisabet Ney, as she herself often pointed out, was one of those exceptions.17 When Ney arrived in Munich in 1852, however, she took one of the routes usually traveled by aspiring women artists. She began instruction in a private school, in this case one run by the history painter Johann Baptiste Berdelle. Berdelle, who had been trained in Diisseldorf under the Nazarene Wilhelm von Schadow, was an eccentric painter who produced reflective, dreamy scenes of antiquity and dabbled in color theory. Though now little known, he was influential in mid-nineteenth century Munich and had trained many of the city's most prominent artists. Further, he numbered among his close friends Gottfried von Neureuther, court architect for Ludwig II, who later granted Ney some of her most important commissions.18 Ney rarely mentioned this part of her training; she preferred to capitalize on the dramatic story of her admission to the Munich Academy. Always prone to the dramatic, Ney liked to tell people she was the first woman admitted to that prestigious institution. In fact her claim was a slight exaggeration. At least one other woman, Maria Ellenreider, had previously received permission to enter the academy, in 1813. She, however, had been a painter, and her admission had been a very special case many years earlier. More accurately, no woman had ever before enrolled in the sculpture department, and as Ney later recounted and Bride Taylor repeated, the director of the Munich Academy, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, adamantly refused to admit her. His main objection, Ney remembered, was that the presence of a beautiful young woman might disrupt the class. Ney herself was "gently ingratiating but firm," Taylor would later report, perhaps adding a seemingly proper touch of femininity to her subject's demeanor. With such gentle persuasiveness, the determined young woman eventually overcame the famous director's refusal and won an agreement from him. She could attend classes, on trial, as long as she did not prove a distraction. To ensure propriety, an instructor from the academy escorted her to and from classes, and she promised to withdraw if any unseemly incident occurred. None did, for as Ney dramatized it to Taylor, "The Munich boys . . . fell into a preternatural quiet the instant she appeared in

A Rebellious Personality 7

the doorway of the classroom." 1 9 Fate, it seems, had marked her as someone special. Ney remained at the Munich Academy for nearly two years. Although she apparently never talked much about her career there, she presumably followed the normal course for students of sculpture. Her classes would have included instruction in drawing from ancient casts, anatomy, and modeling, and as was the custom in German art academies of the period, her development would have been supervised by a single instructor. Ney's mentor was M a x Widnmann, and though she generally credited her later, more famous master Christian Rauch with her development, Widnmann at the very least helped predispose her to ideas and skills she later acquired. Widnmann had received his earliest training with Ludwig von Schwanthaler, the sculptor responsible for much of the decoration of nineteenthcentury Munich's public architecture, and he later had spent three years in Rome with the famous Danish neoclassicist Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen. Widnmann's own work included a number of ideal pieces based on classical mythology, and he insisted his students begin their studies by copying from the antique. Widnmann also had a reputation for requiring students to know every step of the sculptural process, even those chores normally left to assistants. 20 This latter lesson proved particularly important to Ney, for much of her work was to be executed far from any experienced or skilled studio help. The city of Munich was instructive as well. With its population of over 100,000, it was nearly four times the size of Ney's native Miinster, and its attractions for an aspiring artist were great. Thanks to the largesse of Ludwig I, who reigned from 1825 to 1848, more than thirty public structures had been built during the 1830s and 1840s. Among them were such buildings as the Glyptothek, housing the royal family's sculpture collection, and the Alte Pinakothek, containing Ludwig's assiduously gathered collection of medieval and Renaissance paintings, drawings, and engravings. When Ludwig's son Maximilian II succeeded his father, he continued Ludwig's art program. Shortly after Ney's arrival in Munich, the Neue Pinakothek, which housed the state's collection of modern paintings, also opened its doors. 2 1 This building program helped nurture a sense of community and a feeling of importance among the artists who flocked to Munich during the period. Writing about Munich at approximately the same time Ney was there, the British painter Anna Mary Howitt described the life of the young German artists "as nearly approaching perfect beauty and bliss as any human life is permitted to be." They "live in a country where the symbol-

8

ism of art everywhere surrounds them; where the sordid chores of life usually press less heavily upon them, and where a spirit of peculiarly noble aspiration and grandeur in art floats through the land." Although Ney herself told Bride Taylor about her life in Munich only in vague terms, calling it "enchanting" and the fulfillment of "all that youth craves," she seems to have acquired the attitude then pervading Munich that art was not only a noble calling but also a way of life.22 While Ney was thus developing both professionally and intellectually, her private life was beginning to take shape as well. Apparently when Ney was studying with Berdelle, she became friends with a fellow student, Johanna Kapp, daughter of the liberal Heidelberg philosopher Christian Kapp. Sometime in 18 5 3 Ney visited Heidelberg with Johanna, and at the Kapps' home she met a young Scotsman, Edmund Montgomery (fig. 2). A medical student at the University of Heidelberg, Montgomery attracted Ney instantly. As she told Bride Taylor, he seemed "to her romantic soul, like a hero just stepped out of the pages of some splendid book." He was tall, with long blond curls "falling to his broad shoulders," and his ideas about politics and philosophy were certainly more revolutionary than any she herself had formed. She found, Ney recalled to Taylor, that "he echoed the revolt in her own soul" and filled her with "renewed inspiration." On his part, Montgomery remembered their meeting somewhat less romantically. As he later recalled, when he met Ney he found her "a determined, gifted but ignorant little girl eager to learn," yet he too immediately fell in love.23 Like Ney's, Montgomery's background was colored by romance. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 19 March 1835, but as his biographer Ira Stephens states, though he acknowledged that both his parents were Scottish, "the circumstances of his birth seem . . . to have been such as to cause the curtains of secrecy to be securely drawn about all facts pertaining to his ancestry." Estate records, however, reveal that his mother was a Mrs. Isabella Montgomery and that his father was probably Duncan McNeill, a distinguished jurist, at one time lord advocate of Scotland and in his later years a member of the peerage as Baron Colonsay and Oronsay. If in fact McNeill was Montgomery's father, Montgomery's parents were probably never married. Although he was born in Scotland, Montgomery was raised by his mother on the Continent in Paris and Frankfurt, where at the age of thirteen he participated in the liberal uprising of 1848. From Frankfurt, he went to Heidelberg in 18 5 2 to begin his medical studies. There, however, he was as interested in the unorthodox theological and philosophical positions being discussed in Christian Kapp's home as he was in his courses

A Rebellious Personality 9

Figure 2. Edmund Montgomery in a photograph probably taken during the 1850s. Courtesy Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas. at the university. The materialistic views of Jacob Moleschott and Ludwig Feuerbach and the liberal Hegelian position of Kapp, both argued at Kapp's home close to the university, stimulated Montgomery's lifelong search for a scientific or materialistic explanation for vital and mental phenomena. Ney, too, undertook this quest, for as Montgomery recalled to a friend over fifty years later, she "shared my joys and sorrows ever since we m e t . . . at Heidelberg, when we pledged ourselves to lead an ideal life together."24 At first, with Ney in Munich and Montgomery in Heidelberg, their

10

"ideal life" was carried on by a correspondence that consisted, Bride Taylor reported, "of verse only." Within the year, however, Ney completed her training at the Munich Academy. A certificate dated 29 July 1854 attested that she had successfully met the academy's requirements for the course in sculpture and that the faculty could recommend her highly if she should apply for a scholarship at another institution.25 Ney decided to exercise that option in Berlin. There she and Montgomery could be together, he continuing his studies at the University of Berlin and she fulfilling her childhood dream of studying with the aging sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch. Although Rauch's reputation did not survive into the twentieth century, he was probably the most famous European sculptor of the mid-nineteenth century. Thus Ney's desire to study with him was understandable. Harriet Hosmer, Elisabet Ney's contemporary, spoke of Rauch as "the first sculptor of the age." Hosmer's own mentor, the Englishman John Gibson, wrote of Rauch in similar terms. To Heinrich von Treitschke, the historian and propagandist for Imperial Germany, he was one of the greatest artistic heroes of Prussia. His career spanned the first half of the nineteenth century, and most of the major German capitals owned examples of his work. Ney might have been familiar with his figures on a monument to Wilhelm von Horn in Munster, for example, or with his numerous works in Munich. He had achieved fame with a memorial to Queen Louise of Prussia in 1812, but his most famous work was the monument to Frederick the Great in Berlin, which he completed in 1852 after nearly thirteen years' labor.26 Like that of most sculptors during this time, Rauch's work was thoroughly grounded in neoclassicism, a movement that dominated European art and architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Originally, neoclassical style was the artistic corollary of Enlightenment thought. Where the philosophes espoused the ideas of an orderly, rational universe, neoclassical artists emphasized the appeal of order, clarity, and emotional control and sought in ancient models certain immutable rules and standards. Excavations of ancient artifacts at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1730s and 1740s had helped to arouse interest in antique objects, and the writings of numerous artists, critics, and historians had stimulated artists' awareness of the aesthetic possibilities of classical models. Perhaps the most influential of these commentators was the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who outlined his theories in two treatises, Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke (Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works) (1755) and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art) (1764). Very simply, in these

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works he advocated that artists turn away from the frivolity, decorativeness, and emotional display of baroque and rococo art to an art like that of the ancients, which expressed in his famous words "eine edel Einfalt und eine stille Grosse," a noble simplicity and a serene grandeur.27 As literary historian Henry Hatfield has shown, Winckelmann's analysis of Greek art seems rather simplistic today. But to the educated population of the eighteenth century, schooled in ideas of the anachronism of Greek thought and the superstitious nature of Greek mythology, his theses "struck . . . with the force of revelation." With the publication of his two major works, Winckelmann became a major public figure almost immediately, and his ideas influenced countless writers and artists throughout Europe.28 Poetry, architecture, painting, and sculpture all felt the impact of neoclassical ideas in general and Winckelmann's theories in particular. The most pervasive, if not the most fortuitous, influence, however, was probably upon sculpture. One reason for the ready assimilation of neoclassicism by sculptors, no doubt, was that most antique artifacts were sculpture, and Winckelmann's two great examples of Greek art, the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere, were themselves statuary. Therefore sculptors could most easily follow what would be another of Winckelmann's most famous dicta: "There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled, I mean, by imitating the ancients." Winckelmann's use of the word Nachahmung or "imitation" was unclear, however, and this ambiguity eventually led to two major trends within neoclassic sculpture. The first, dominated by Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, showed a more literal interpretation of Winckelmann and other neoclassic theorists and a greater reliance upon ancient subject matter and forms even when depicting contemporary personalities and events. This group, which Fritz Novotny characterizes as being "dominated by art theory, and always concerned with a world of gods and Titans," contrasted with another that interpreted neoclassic theory more loosely. This second group, which included Jean-Antoine Houdon, Johan Tobias von Sergei, and Johann Gottfried Schadow, was more likely to reflect the spirit than the actual letter of antique forms. It was perhaps more "sensuous," retaining something of the spirit and form of the baroque, and it "devoted its efforts to the lifelike representation of man." 29 Christian Rauch belonged in both camps. As a young man he had studied with Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome, and he returned to Berlin an avid follower of the theories of his countryman Winckelmann. As his contemporary the historian Treitschke pointed out, Rauch was, like Winckelmann, "a firm believer in the affinity of the Hellenic with the Teutonic

12

genius." Thus he promoted the study of antique models for the layman as well as the sculptor, and he saw that cast collections were established at various universities throughout Prussia. In most of his work, however, the influence of Gottfried Schadow, his first mentor and fellow Berliner, was at least as strong as that of Thorvaldsen. Like Schadow's, much of Rauch's work was portraiture, and his busts, full-length statues, and monuments to individuals reveal a concern for man as human being rather than god. As the German scholar Peter Bloch has pointed out, Rauch's major contribution was that he found an "adequate form," one both "noble" and "understandable," for his "idea of man." At their best, Rauch's portraits show a concern for the individual expressed within the bounds of simplicity and repose of form. Those works, sometimes to his clients' chagrin, usually revealed a likeness more realistic than classically idealized. Goethe, for example, was said to be displeased with the portrait Rauch produced of him, for in his attempt to portray Goethe accurately the sculptor had, in the poet's opinion, made his face too fat. At their worst his portraits tended toward what Novotny has termed "prettifying . . . the smooth and pleasing . . . a courtly elegance," characteristics more likely to endear him to patrons than to art historians.30 Aside from a tendency toward naturalism that was typical of most early and middle nineteenth-century sculptors, Rauch's work showed little growth and development over his long career. Thus, while Ney's desire to study with such a famous and well-established sculptor was understandable, it was hardly revolutionary. By the mid-nineteenth century, Rauch's style was the standard for academic sculpture and was well liked by those who could afford to commission it. It reflected little if any, for example, of the Romantic revolt so pervasive in Germany in the first part of the nineteenth century. The problem was hardly Rauch's alone, however. Little truly Romantic sculpture existed anywhere in Europe. The major reason for this anomaly was probably what numerous historians have asserted: sculpture was simply too expensive an art form to allow the kind of stylistic innovation that painting underwent. A sculptor's tools and materials represented a large investment, and thus he worked not so much to please himself as to satisfy a "substantial clientele" that was "generally conservative in taste." Only in France did the artistic and political conditions allow sculptors such as Francois Rude or Antoine-Auguste Preault to turn out truly innovative forms reflecting Romanticism's preoccupation with the truths to be found in disorder, emotion, and intuition. German patrons, it seems, preferred what Bloch has called Rauch's "appeal to common sense."31 Ney, however, seems to have made no pretense that Rauch's work was

A Rebellious Personality

13

revolutionary or that she herself had any great desire to be an innovative artist. What she did make seem revolutionary was that she should dare to become Rauch's student, and though the goal was an ambitious one, it was hardly as daring as Ney apparently led her Austin friends to believe. To Bride Taylor, Ney's confrontation with Rauch and the Berlin art world "was like an assault upon a fortress." Rauch, Taylor believed, hated the work of teaching and rarely took a pupil. In fact, he had many students; at one time as many as fifty were aides in his workshop or students at the Berlin Academy. His influence among these pupils was so weighty that "the Rauch school" dominated the Berlin art scene from the 1830s until the 1890s, more than thirty years after his death in 18 57. Furthermore, the idea of women sculptors was hardly the novelty to Rauch that Ney seems to have implied. Bride Taylor stated that when Ney entered Berlin she came as an "unrecognized warning of a new type of woman, asking for herself a share of life's glory." Her arrival, however, was probably somewhat less dramatic to Rauch than Taylor believed. Rauch himself had taught several women, and only a year before Ney's arrival in Berlin, he had visited the studio of John Gibson in Rome and had been impressed with the work of Gibson's student Harriet Hosmer. As Gibson wrote to Hosmer's father, "I showed him [Rauch] all she [Hosmer] had done. . . . Rauch was much struck and pleased with her works, and expressed his opinion that she would be a clever sculptor."32 What in fact Ney had to do to become a student of Rauch was the same as for any prospective pupil. She had to submit a sketch so Rauch could assess her talent. Although the kind of piece she executed has not been recorded, Rauch apparently approved of her work and installed her as a student in his studio in Berlin's Lagerhaus sometime in late 1854 or early 1855. He also helped her gain admission to the Berlin Academy, which at the time was also generally closed to women. 33 Little specific information about Ney's relationship with Rauch is available. Although Bride Taylor claimed that she achieved a reputation as "Rauch's favorite pupil," his principal biographers Friedrich and Karl Eggers list her as only one among his late students, and a more recent scholar of Berlin sculpture, Peter Bloch, fails to mention her at all. Nevertheless, studying with the German master was important to Ney in several ways. First, it naturally affected her style and working methods. Copying ancient models was an important part of her training, as it was for all sculptors throughout the nineteenth century, and it instilled a knowledge of neoclassical canons of taste. 34 How thoroughly she grasped those ideals is evident in one of her first professional works, a statue of Saint

14

Sebastian that her early supporter from Minister, Bishop Muller, commissioned in 1857 (fig. 3). Saint Sebastian was a fourth-century martyr who had served as an officer in the imperial guard of Rome. Upon his public confession of Christianity, he was sentenced to be shot with arrows, and when he miraculously recovered from that ordeal he was again ordered to be executed, this time by being beaten. A popular subject in medieval and Renaissance art, Sebastian most often appeared bound to a tree trunk or column, pierced with arrows. Because of the nature of his suffering and death, Saint Sebastian also seems an appropriate topic for a Romantic artist, and at least one nineteenth-century sculptor, the French Expressionist EmileAntoine Bourdelle, depicted the drama inherent in the saint's martyrdom (fig. 4)- 35 Although Bourdelle's bronze was completed in 1883, some twenty-five years after Ney's work, a comparison between the two is instructive, for it helps reveal the nature of Ney's aesthetic concerns. The position, expression, and iconography of Bourdelle's Sebastian all emphasize the agony suffered by the martyred saint. He is bound to a tree trunk as if to a cross, and his crumpled, twisted torso and legs reveal an arrow piercing his thigh. The outstretched arms reach heavenward, his head is flung back, and his open mouth seems to beseech God to rescue him from his pain. This twisted and agonized depiction by Bourdelle contrasts sharply with Ney's portrayal of the saint. Her Sebastian has triumphed over his martyrdom. No longer bound, he stands upright in much the same stance as Polyclitus's Spear-Bearer, clutching two arrows in his right hand. Whereas the nudity of Bourdelle's Sebastian reveals his bodily strain and agony, the partial drapery of Ney's saint softens his aspect and gives him an air of grace and ease. The nude left breast and shoulder show no mark of tension but are broad and erect, and in contrast to the contorted and roughly modeled face of Bourdelle's Sebastian, the face of Ney's is serene and so smooth and beautiful that it looks almost like a woman's. Thus, while Bourdelle's Sebastian depicts an individual at a discrete moment of torment, Ney's Sebastian, with its classic stance and idealized body and face, emphasizes not only the subject's nobility, but also his timelessness. Ney's Saint Sebastian, in short, is an idealized type rather than a human being. The Saint Sebastian, however, was a depiction of a legendary figure of whom there were no existing historical images; when Ney dealt with a live model, her work was not so idealized. From Rauch, she also apparently learned to include individual characteristics when modeling portraits. Her portrait bust of the philologist and collector of fairy tales Jacob Grimm, for

A Rebellious Personality

15

Figure 3. Ney, Saint Sebastian, about 1857. Plaster, height 32 inches. Courtesy Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas. Photograph by Tim Davis.

16

Figure 4. Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Saint Sebastian, 1883. Bronze, height 28 inches. Musee Antoine Bourdelle, Paris. Courtesy Musee Antoine Bourdelle. Copyright ARS NY/ADAGP 1987

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example, completed in 1858, the year after her Saint Sebastian, combines both classical and realistic elements, an approach for which Rauch himself was famous (fig. 5). In form the Grimm bust adheres to classical norms. The head faces directly forward and is solidly attached to the nude shoulders and chest, which truncate in a classic Greek herm. This frontal composition, along with unincised eyes and firmly set mouth, gives a certain strength and dignity to the scholar who by the 1850s had achieved widespread respect for his work in German folklore and language. Along with the acclaim, however, had come age, and here Ney does not idealize but clearly depicts the passage of time on Grimm's face. Lines of age appear around his mouth, and his once full cheeks seem sunken. The skin sags from chin and jowls, and Grimm's hair, though flatteringly full at the sides, recedes at the temples. No longer the young rebel of Gottingen in 1837, Grimm here is the well-loved and established, though aging, Berlin academician.36 While the bust of Jacob Grimm illustrates the nature of Ney's aesthetic inheritance from Rauch, it also exemplifies a second area in which Ney was indebted to her Berlin mentor. Once when Bride Taylor asked Ney what had impelled her to undertake sculpture as a career, Ney replied not that she felt the need for artistic expression, but that she "wished to meet the great persons of the world." Studying with Rauch, no doubt, helped Ney achieve that goal. Not only was being a student of Rauch an important credit, one likely to impress future clientele, but as court sculptor and a member of Berlin's artistic and intellectual elite, Rauch was himself in an excellent position to introduce Ney to the kind of people she wished to meet. Apparently he did so, for many years later Montgomery wrote of the numerous "interesting circles" he and Ney had frequented in Berlin, among them the group surrounding the retired diplomat Karl Varnhagen von Ense, a close friend of Rauch as well as of Jacob Grimm. Ney's association with these men helped her both to meet and sculpt the world's "great persons" and also to establish herself as "celebrated" and famous. As the tale of her life progressed, these aspects of Ney's persona became as significant as her image as a daring trailblazer. Her associates would be as important to her supporters in Texas as the goals she had accomplished in her quest to become a sculptor.37

18

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A Figure 5. Ney, Jacob Grimm, 1858. Plaster, height 19 inches. Courtesy Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas. Photograph by Tim Davis.

A Rebellious Personality

19

i. T\)& Great Men of t()eWortd

A

J L J L . lthough Elisabet Ney's student works had included religious and ideal pieces, one of her entries in the 1856 Berlin Academy exhibition was of a different genre, one that indicated the course of her future career. Along with a grave stele depicting a kneelingfigurein relief, Ney exhibited a portrait bust of Berlin author and professor Hermann Weiss. The bust received favorable criticism, with one writer calling it a "work of merit" that "shows that Fraulein Ney possesses to a high degree a rare feeling for art." It also revealed a gift for portraiture because, the critic asserted, Ney had "captured the nuances without giving too much detail."1 Aside from occasional commissions for allegorical and religious pieces and a few ideal works she completed for herself, Ney most frequently exercised this talent for depicting the human likeness in the form of busts and medallions. Despite her talent for portraiture, Ney's direction as a sculptor may not have been entirely her own choice. Throughout the nineteenth century, successful sculptors generally worked on contract, and as large-scale commissions declined from both church and state, in the past the primary patrons of sculptors, the demand for portrait sculpture increased. Part of the nineteenth century's inheritance from the eighteenth was the Enlightenment's emphasis on individual genius as worthy of respect and emulation. This idea had a strong influence on the arts. As historians of nineteenthcentury sculpture assert—and as the basements of countless libraries and museums attest—"every personage of national or local fame, whether in arts, letters, or politics, and every well-off bourgeois thought he had a duty to leave behind him the image of his presence." Despite the development of photography, painting and sculpture continued to be the most accepted media for perpetuating these individuals' images until late in the nineteenth century.2

20

The rising popularity of portrait sculpture turned out to be a boon to women sculptors. Gaining admission to the Munich and Berlin academies had been difficult enough for Ney, but receiving commissions for monumental sculpture might well have been impossible. Harriet Hosmer's monument to Thomas Hart Benton was one of the few large-scale commissions undertaken by a woman sculptor before the 1890s, and she received that commission because her major benefactor in the United States was on the selection committee. Generally Hosmer, like most of her female colleagues, modeled smaller pieces. Though hardly an exclusively feminine domain, portrait busts and medallions, because of their small scale and because they required little knowledge of anatomy, seemed appropriate work for women who dared to be sculptors. Ney's ambitions and talents thus overlapped fortuitously with the cultural and artistic currents of her time. She generally exercised her gift as a portraitist, however, not upon the obscure, such as the long-forgotten Weiss, but on the famous, such as Jacob Grimm. In fact, from the time of her association with Rauch in the mid1850s until her departure for America in 1870, the list of Ney's works reads like a Who's Who of European artistic, intellectual, and political life.3 The first group of famous persons Ney modeled were all associated in one way or another with the Berlin circles she frequented during her student days with Rauch and in the few years immediately following his death in 1857. The most important of these groups was the salon associated with Karl Varnhagen von Ense. During the last years of the 18 50s, Ney not only completed her bust of Grimm, but also modeled a bust of Varnhagen and a medallion of perhaps the most revered German intellectual of the time, Alexander von Humboldt, another close friend of Varnhagen. The latter two works have long been lost, but they probably were, at least in style, very similar to the Grimm bust, combining classic form with natural detail. No descriptions of them exist either, but that is hardly surprising: what was important about these pieces, at least to Ney's later public, was who was modeled rather than how they were depicted. That Ney had known these great men, Grimm, Varnhagen, and Humboldt, and had modeled them from life made her both interesting and important. In this case, as in many others, Ney shone in the reflected glory of the men she portrayed.4 The Varnhagen circle, however, did more than build Ney's reputation. Through her association with the individuals belonging to the group, the sculptor apparently picked up a set of ideas that, with modifications and varying emphases, she continued to espouse throughout her life. By the 1850s, however, those ideas were hardly radical. The group that gathered at Varnhagen's Berlin estate was an aging one. Grimm and Humboldt,

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21

though still producing important work, were in their seventies and thus members of an older generation; likewise Bettina von Arnim, a prominent intellectual of the 1830s and 1840s, was also past her most radical phase. All had been influenced by a set of ideas that had its heyday earlier in the century. As defined by historian Koppel S. Pinson, these ideas derived from classical humanism, a school of thought to which figures as diverse as Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Kant—all well known by the survivors in the Varnhagen circle—had contributed major tenets. Basically classical humanism, a more specifically German form of Enlightenment thought, was a revolt against the narrow political and religious world view of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Secular in outlook, it emphasized the human element in history and the importance of man's reason; it also stressed fully developing one's own personality rather than aiming for otherworldly goals. Whereas in England, France, and America such ideas produced specific political theories and national repercussions, in Germany, according to Pinson, they yielded only vague ideas of "universal peace, world citizenship and brotherhood." The German followers of classical humanism were more interested in the world of aesthetics and beauty than in statecraft. Influenced by the work of their countryman Winckelmann, they were particularly imbued with the idea that the ancient world provided a role model not only for the well-developed individual, but also for "an esthetic culture of true humanity." Thus the seemingly secular and materialistic world view of the classical humanist was also quite idealistic, a contradiction that apparently failed to bother many of its followers, including, as her life would show, Elisabet Ney.5 The Varnhagen circle may have provided Ney with other ideas as well. In discussing the influence Berlin's intellectual life had upon Ney, two of her early biographers, Jan Fortune and Vernon Loggins, emphasize the importance of the former diplomat's deceased wife. Rahel Lewin Varnhagen, who died in 1833, more than twenty years before Ney's appearance in Berlin, had hosted one of the city's most important salons during the early nineteenth century. Goethe, Schleiermacher, the brothers Schlegel, and Humboldt, among many other important men, frequented her home, not only because of the understanding and encouragement she supposedly provided, but also because she was renowned for keen insight and flashes of intuition about the most important questions of the day. A Jew who despite her later conversion never completely lost her feeling of being an outsider, Rahel was an important example of a woman "who craved intellectual progress," "sought emancipation," and "took advantage of every opportunity" to achieve respect. Her husband had been totally capti-

22

vated by her personality, and for the twenty-six years between her death and his own, she continued to be an almost palpable presence in his home. He not only published the letters and sayings for which she had become famous, but also continually referred to and talked about her. Thus, if Ney frequented Varnhagen's salon in the mid-i850s as often as his diary and the letters of his niece and companion Ludmilla Assing indicate, she undoubtedly knew about Rahel, and Fortune's and Loggin's assumption that Rand's personality was an influence on Ney's own seems logical.6 Curiously, however, Ney never seems to have mentioned Rahel either to Bride Taylor or in the letters in which she described her life in Germany. Only in the 1904 interview with the Washington Post did she make a statement that might be construed as a reference to Rahel. After commenting that she was descended from revolutionaries, Ney stated, "you might also say I have Jewish traditions and that is why I spell my name without the final 'h.'" On the surface, Ney's explanation for the spelling of her name makes no sense. "Elisabet" is no more Jewish than the "Elisabeth" with which the sculptor was christened. But given the knowledge that Rahel Varnhagen had originally been named Rachel but dropped the "c" as a young woman, the statement might well be taken as a reference to the famous intellectual and hostess. Thus the strange claim not only may indicate that Ney knew about Rahel, but may suggest that she identified with her at least enough to falsely claim the same racial and religious background, a background that would have been meaningful to Ney on several levels. The idea of being Jewish, with its implications of rootlessness, not only was significant to a group of intellectuals who at least in the abstract both valued the Jew for his world citizenship and championed him because of his suffering, but also was particularly pertinent to women. While to a woman being Jewish might imply a total lack of power and prestige even within one's own social group, by the mid-nineteenth century in Germany it could also indicate a certain amount of liberation and respect. At the time Ney associated with the Varnhagen circle, the most important women in Germany, aside from members of the royal family, had been Jewish, most notably Dorothea Veit von Schlegel, Henriette Herz von Schleiermacher, and Rahel Lewin Varnhagen, all well known as intellectuals and all well accepted at most levels of society.7 That Ney, like Rahel, felt herself an outsider is understandable given the social conditions of the time; likewise, that she might use Rahel as a role model to overcome her own limitations of both sex and class is plausible. Thus the most interesting aspect of her statement is its obliqueness. That Ney never mentioned Rahel by name, much less produced a portrait of her

The Great Men of the World 2.3

or any of the other prominent women associated with the Varnhagen circle is significant. It indicates that, like Rahel, she found her path to equality not through working with women, but by associating with men. Although identifying with another woman's struggle might have helped her with her own, acknowledging any debt probably would have been self-defeating and would have undermined the image of singularity she cultivated. To be successful, Ney apparently believed she had to be accepted in the world of established men. Her next major work of sculpture could well be seen as an attempt to prove her credibility both as an artist and as a person. "Why do you look at me so, doctor?" Ney is supposed to have asked the aging philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as she was modeling his portrait in 1859. "I am just trying if, perhaps, I cannot discover a little mustache," was his lengendary reply. "It becomes to me each day more impossible to believe that you are a woman." Whether or not this exchange ever took place, it is often repeated in the accounts of Ney's experiences while creating her bust of Schopenhauer. As the story goes, Ney is supposed to have arrived in Frankfurt from Berlin during the fall of 1859 and gone straight without warning to the philosopher's home. She requested an audience, and when the servant who answered the door refused, she walked in and admitted herself to Schopenhauer's study. She then informed the startled man that she wished to model his portrait, and although he gruffly refused atfirst,saying he "had no wish to have a bust made—least of all by an unknown, over bold 'madchen,'" he finally relented, just as Kaulbach, Rauch, and the directors of the Berlin Academy were supposed to have done before him.8 Although this story is one that is almost always used as an example of Ney's daring and resolve, the only evidence that such a scene occurred is Ney's own account as reported by Bride Taylor. Letters written by Schopenhauer to numerous friends in 1859 and i860 omit any details of their first meeting, but they do indicate that a friendly relationship developed between Ney and the philosopher while she was modeling his bust. To one friend, Ernst Otto Lindner of Berlin, he wrote, "Perhaps you know the sculptress Ney. If not you have lost a great deal," and to Adam von Doss of Munich he confided, "The Ney is 24, very beautiful, and indescribably charming. Day after day she works in the room adjoining my study. . . . Often we take walks along the Main, over stick and stone. We are wholly sympathetic."9 That Ney was as interested in Schopenhauer as he was in her is quite unlikely. According to Montgomery, Ney undertook the old man's portrait to prove something to him. As the Scotsman recounted to several friends,

*4

he had been absorbed in the philosopher's writing during the 1850s and, like many others, found that Schopenhauer "had no respect for the talent and character of women." Thus he and Ney resolved "to give him a lesson" about women's abilities, one the old man apparently learned well.10 A more basic motivation probably underlay Ney's desire to model the philosopher's bust, however. Back in Berlin her world of "great men" was crumbling: Varnhagen had died in 1858 and Rauch the year before. The latter death was particularly devastating to Ney. Generally, once their training was finished, young sculptors in Berlin continued to work in their masters' ateliers. They supported themselves as assistants while trying to win contracts by showing their own works at exhibitions. Many sculptors had to wait years before going off on their own, though when they did their incomes were usually good. Rauch's death denied Ney this opportunity to test her talent under his care. Except for the commission from Bishop Muller for Saint Sebastian, Ney probably received little money for the few works she had completed.11 Whether by luck or by calculation, Ney and Montgomery chose an ideal subject to draw attention—and they hoped, commissions—to the sculptor. Although Schopenhauer's work had been ignored for decades, both his major treatise The World as Will and Idea and his collections of essays received a great deal of attention in the 1850s. As the historian Hajo Holborn has pointed out, Schopenhauer's "reduction of human life to the private sphere, in disregard of the individual's participation in the political and social process"—in other words, his belief in tending one's own garden—was particularly appealing to a generation that had seen political activism crushed in the 1848 revolution. Thus Ney's bust was made to appeal to a large segment of the population that might look to it, as preceding generations had looked to Houdon's portrait of Voltaire, for example, for moral and intellectual edification. Yet aside from its didactic aim, it also served to publicize the sculptor. By inducing Schopenhauer to sit for his portrait, Ney not only taught him a lesson, but showed the public that she had the courage to overcome the objections of a man widely known as a woman hater and the talent to win the approval of a philosopher who believed art was the main path to knowledge and salvation.12 In the months after its completion, Schopenhauer's bust was exhibited in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Leipzig and received favorable responses (fig. 6). The philosopher himself was pleased with its reception in Frankfurt and delighted, as he told one correspondent, that people found it "extremely like me." Given that Schopenhauer was almost as well known for his vanity as for his dislike of women, he would naturally have been happy that the

The Great Men of the World

25

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Figure 6. This photograph of Ney's bust of Schopenhauer appeared in Open Court magazine. The editors of the journal had requested that Ney allow them to make duplicate copies of the plaster and offer them for sale to their readers. The inscription beneath the photograph was one Schopenhauer made in a copy of his The World as Will and Idea when he presented it to Ney. Courtesy Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin.

26

bust's viewers recognized him. While the likeness in fact is good, it is also flattering. The erectness of Schopenhauer's head, the firmness of his chin, the smooth modeling of his skin, and the taming of the hair surrounding his bald crown give a regal and heroic bearing to the man who had suffered so many years of anonymity. They also make him look a good deal younger than his seventy-one years, a detail that is more obvious when the bust is compared with daguerrotypes made about the same time. Yet if this portrait is more idealized than the one of Jacob Grimm, it is also more lively. The now incised eyes, the slight twist of the head, and the ambiguous smile or grimace that plays at the corners of his mouth make Schopenhauer's personality more accessible. In this bust Ney was not only making a reputation, but also extending her skill as an artist.13 Before the casting of the Schopenhauer bust was complete, Ney received her first important commission. Whether she had lobbied for the work or whether she received the summons unexpectedly is unknown, but late in 1859 her presence was requested in Hannover to model the bust of George V, last of the Guelph kings and perhaps the most reactionary monarch left in Germany. The political implications of her royal patronage did not seem to bother Ney, however, despite the fact that one of her previous subjects, Jacob Grimm, had lost his academic position in Hannover in 1837 after refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the royal family. As Ney wrote to Schopenhauer, echoing his philosophy as well as that of her earlier mentors, people made too much "trouble over politics." It was something they could neither understand nor change, but should rise above if "imbued with a lofty and creative soul." Apparently Ney had little doubt about her own state of grace, for she remained in Hannover several months, completing a bust of the blind monarch. Ney's presence and reports of the completed portrait must have pleased King George and his family, for he subsequently commissioned Ney to model a bust of the famous singer Julius Stockhausen, who was then performing in Hannover, and in later years one of his renowned court violinist Joseph Joachim.14 King George also was pleased enough with Ney to commission a portrait of her by his court painter Friedrich Kaulbach, nephew of the Munich Academy's director. The resulting painting shows Ney in a pose typical of portraits and self-portraits of artists: she stands, modeling tool in hand, with her arm resting lightly upon the table that holds the king's bust (fig. 7). The accoutrements of her profession are scattered around; a portfolio with sheaves of paper leans against the modeling table, and a cloth used either to drape the bust or to clean the clay hangs from the pedestal. By depicting her in this manner, Kaulbach was linking Ney with artists of the past and thus

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Figure 7. Friedrich Kaulbach, Uartiste (Elisabet Ney). Oil on canvas, 202 x 121 cm. Courtesy Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum Hannover.

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certifying her as a member of the profession, an intention underscored by the title of the painting. Rather than referring specifically to Ney, Kaulbach, significantly, entitled his portrait L'artiste.15 Kaulbach's use of the French rather than the German word for artist perhaps indicates another reference in his portrait. Although Ney's pose belongs to artistic convention, it is still startlingly reminiscent of the portrait of another woman sculptor, Princess Marie-Christine d'Orleans, daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. That portrait, though a sculpture rather than a painting, shows the princess in a pose very similar to Ney's. The left and right are reversed, a change of little significance, and the princess is gazing downward whereas Ney directly confronts the viewer, a modification that probably was important. No documents exist showing that either Kaulbach or Ney knew of this work, but because it had been completed nearly twenty years before Ney's portrait and because Princess Marie-Christine was such a popular and beloved figure, it is likely they were familiar with it. If so, the portrait does more than link Ney generally with artists of the past; more specifically, it stresses the parallel with an earlier female prototype. By making the allusion to Princess Marie d'Orleans, famous for her statue of Joan of Arc, Kaulbach elevated Ney's reputation. In effect he is making her, to those familiar with the earlier portrait, the heiress to the fame of the French noblewoman. As art historian Anne Sutherland Harris points out, "their scarcity gave every woman artist the advantage (perhaps dubious) of some curiosity value," an idea Kaulbach's portrait obviously plays upon but does not exploit. Although he depicts Ney as more attractive than photographs reveal she was, he does not sensationalize her personality or her appearance. Ney is modestly and appropriately dressed in a dark, highnecked gown, and a cross hangs prominently on her chest. Thus Kaulbach indicates that even though she has undertaken a nontraditional career, her life-style and morals are still above reproach, and he has made the sculptor's direct gaze less threatening.16 Ney was not always so fortunate, however. While she was in Hannover, she was becoming something of a celebrity. Part of the attention derived, no doubt, from the fact that she was a woman artist; some also came from the publicity surrounding her success in getting Schopenhauer to sit for her. As she wrote to the philosopher, "Here I am regarded as 'Schopenhauerish.' Sometimes there slink up to me from the corners of the salon bearded forms who give their mite of veneration." A great deal of the notice, however, came from attention given to gossip and personal idiosyncrasies, thus revealing the "dubious" side of the woman artist's curiosity value. Joseph

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Joachim, for example, wrote to Clara Schumann in January i860 that he appreciated Ney because of "her talent and her charm," but he implied that "queer stories" had been circulating about her. Julius Stockhausen was more specific. Writing to his father from Hannover, the singer remarked that the king had commissioned his bust from a "young and interesting sculptress . . . Ney from Berlin." The most important comment Stockhausen had to make about her, however, was that "sie hat kurze Locken [she has short hair]," a phrase that in the 1860s would have implied that Ney was consciously flouting social custom. Only after remarking upon her appearance did he note that the sculptor had "talent also" and thus foreshadow the way Ney would be treated throughout her career: her personality, to many symbolized by her appearance, would too often be noticed before her art. 17 After completing her assignment in Hannover, Ney returned to Berlin, where she maintained a studio in the Lagerhaus, the building that housed the studios of many of Berlin's most prominent sculptors. She also continued to frequent that city's leading artistic and intellectual circles. The composer Franz Liszt, for example, wrote to the Princess Wittgenstein about seeing Ney at a concert held in his daughter Cosima von Billow's home. Such contacts, however, were little help to Ney, for apparently the only commission she received during that time was for a bust of the scientist Eilhardt Mitscherlich, which she subsequently exhibited, along with the portrait of Schopenhauer, at the Paris Salon of 1861. 18 Within a year, though, thanks perhaps to the advice of Bishop Muller or to the growing attention to her Saint Sebastian, her hometown recalled her to execute portraits of four Westphalian heroes for the new parliament building then under construction in Minister. These statues of the fourteenth-century nobleman Englebert van der Mark, the fifteenth-century soldier Walter von Plattenberg (fig. 8), and two figures from the eighteenth century, the author Justus Moser (fig. 9) and the government official Franz von Furstenburg (fig. 10), were Ney's first attempts at portraying actual "great men" of the past. Although Ney could idealize Saint Sebastian because he belonged more to legend than fact and because no one had any real idea what he looked like, she apparently believed she had to be more exacting with these figures. As a result she spent more than a year gathering and studying likenesses and finally modeling the four figures.19 The results were four life-size statues, dressed in contemporary garments and holding emblems of their occupations. Walter von Plattenberg, for example, wears a suit of armor and clutches the sword at his side; Justus Moser stands in breeches and frock coat holding a quill and book. Al-

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Figure 8. Ney, Walter von Plattenberg, 1862. Destroyed. Courtesy San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, Texas; gift of Waldemar Kuhlman.

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Figure 9. Ney, Justus Moser, 1862. Destroyed. Courtesy San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, Texas; gift of Waldemar Kuhlman.

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Figure 10. Ney, Franz von Furstenberg, 1862. Destroyed. Courtesy San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, Texas, gift of Waldemar Kuhlman.

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though contemporary costuming was beginning to replace the ancient in German sculpture, Ney's use of it here was still somewhat progressive. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, German heroes occasionally wore Greek togas. The figures' poses, however, were more traditional. In each case the Westphalian heroes stand in typical contrapposto poses varied only by slight changes in the turn of their heads and the position of their hands and arms. The natural quality of the pose, however, differs from statue to statue, with the Franz von Fiirstenberg appearing quite stiff while the Walter von Plattenberg seems most at ease. From photographs, at least, the figures appear somewhat primitive, the work of a still youthful sculptor more accustomed to modeling busts than full figures. Although proportioned correctly, they show little sense of anatomy. The head of Justus Moser, for example, contrasts greatly with the body beneath it; the rather arch yet thoughtful expression, the resolutely set chin, and the direct stare from Moser's eyes give the face a sense of life and personality that is missing from the figure. The statue reveals little of the human form beneath the clothing, and the legs, which are placed in such an awkward position that the figure looks as though it should topple backward, appear particularly stiff, more like wooden pegs than flesh. These flaws did not seem to bother the statues' few critics, however. Levin Schiicking, at the time a famous publisher and novelist, claimed in his review for the lllustrierte Zeitung that they "distinguish themselves in brilliant interpretation of life and motion of the figures," and Hermann Hiiffer, a historian and politician from Munster, was even more appreciative, stating that "this is the first time that the sculptress even ventured a great historical representation. . . . She has given abundant proof that she is richly endowed with all the qualifications necessary for the excellent performance of such a difficult task, one," he added, "so seldom discharged by feminine hands." 20 As Hiiffer later recounted in his memoirs, he had come to know Ney well while she was in Munster. Among the circles he frequented, at least, she had achieved a certain fame and apparently was as well known at the time as Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff, Munster's famous woman author. Hiiffer, and others of the city's intellectual and artistic class, were impressed not only, he records, with Ney's "beauty," but also with "the expression of a certain energetic will" she manifested; and Hiiffer, at least, found her to have "profound intellectual abilities and interests." Hiiffer and Ney apparently discussed what he termed "weighty subjects," and she confided to him an interest in mathematics, a subject she said she was studying at the time "with great interest."21

34

So intrigued was Hiiffer with Ney and her accomplishments that he championed her cause among the town leaders, urging them to commission her to execute a monument to Franz von Fiirstenberg and place it in one of the city's public squares. Ney had already produced a model for the monument Hiiffer proposed and had exhibited it in the rooms of the Miinster Art Society. The work was based on the statue of Fiirstenberg she had completed for the parliament building, but with several changes. The position of the face and arms was modified: in the statue intended for a room in the public building, Fiirstenberg appeared to address his viewer; but in the monument for a public square he gazed out into the distance, and his right hand and arm both connected him with the people around and pushed them back. In the outdoor version, Fiirstenberg wore a cape that fell over his left shoulder. This device was one Ney later used again; although the cape was contemporary and appropriate apparel, it draped like a toga, and thus Ney connected the famed political minister with his statesman predecessors in Rome. 22 Ney also designed a pedestal for the figure, a simple rectangular base with scenes, presumably from Fiirstenberg's life, cut in bas-relief between the foot and capital. In scale the pedestal was rather small; if Ney intended the figure to be approximately life-size, as she generally did, the base was probably meant to be no more than four feet high. Thus art dominated architecture in the proposed monument, and the individual was more important than any abstraction. These emphases placed Ney's work squarely within the nineteenth-century German neoclassical aesthetic, which called for conformity to the lower end of scale and stressed the individual, and they help explain why, in her later years, Ney would so strongly object to much of the monumental work being done in the United States. Despite Hiiffer's efforts, Ney did not obtain the commission, and shortly after the four statues she had completed for the parliamentary hall were placed, she decided to leave Miinster. Hiiffer, who had fallen in love with her, recorded in his memoirs that they parted as close friends, Ney having always "held herself strictly within those bounds." He also apparently learned the reason their relationship had been platonic: "she showed me, upon her writing table, the photograph of a young Englishman," he wrote. "His name was Montgomery." Although she did not say so, Hiiffer reasoned that the Scotsman's residence in London had at least in part influenced Ney's decision to visit England shortly after leaving Miinster. His speculation was probably correct.23 Although they had both gone to Berlin, the active pursuit of their careers had kept Ney and Montgomery from spending long periods together.

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While Ney was traveling from Berlin to Frankfurt to Hannover then back to Berlin and Miinster, Montgomery's life was at least as peripatetic. After two years at the University of Berlin he had moved to Bonn, where in 1856 he enrolled at the university. There he attended lectures by the famous biologist Herman Ludwig von Helmholtz, lectures he later claimed woke him from his "dogmatic slumbers" and introduced him to "the epistemological problem of the relation of body and mind." Although that issue would one day become the subject of his scientific research, in the meantime he had to finish his medical studies. After completing examinations in Wiirzburg in 1858, Montgomery undertook postdoctoral work in Prague, and in 1859 he finished his training in Vienna. The young doctor then left the Continent in i860 and went to London, where he obtained positions as resident physician at both the German Hospital and the Bermondsey Dispensary and as a researcher at Saint Thomas Hospital. Although they saw very little of each other, Ney and Montgomery did stay in touch. From time to time the two would meet for weekends in locations somewhere between their two residences, and later in his life, the Scotsman wrote to a friend that a week never passed that they did not correspond.24 What happened when the couple met in London is not recorded, but 1863 w a s a decisive one in their personal lives. Montgomery, gravely ill from blood poisoning, learned that he had tuberculosis and must leave Britain for a warmer climate. Aside from completing a bust of the British playwright and art critic Tom Taylor, Ney apparently did little to further her public career. Turning from the world of great men, she began to tend to her personal needs.25 Her first trip to London was followed by another in September of that same year, and from Britain she traveled to Madeira, as Hermann Hiiffer recorded, "to spend the winter months in the South." The sculptor, however, apparently had more in mind than vacationing. On 7 November 1863, Elisabet Ney and Edmund Montgomery were married in the British consul's office in Funchal, Madeira. 26 That marriage has been one of the most controversial aspects of the sculptor's life and personality. Because she retained her maiden name and was "Miss Ney" to all who knew her or knew about her, many people, especially those ready to believe the sensational and lurid, were convinced she had never married Montgomery. Others knew of the marriage but, thanks to Ney, believed it had occurred against her will. According to the account the sculptor gave Bride Taylor, Montgomery had been in Madeira a number of months before her arrival. During that time he had built up a lucrative practice among the wealthy British colony, and he feared it would

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suffer because of their unconventional relationship. Thus he forced her into the "galling humiliation" of marriage, for which he was repaid, Taylor reported, by being shut out of the studio he built for her on the island.27 Montgomery's biographer Ira Stephens, however, has unraveled a number of details about the physician's life before the marriage that cast doubt on Ney's dramatic tale. According to his research, the ceremony had in fact been planned and consented to several months before either of the two arrived in Madeira. For example, Montgomery's close friend and supervisor at Saint Thomas Hospital, Sir John Simon, recorded in his Personal Recollections that Montgomery had left London for Madeira not only for his health, but also "with a view to marriage with the eminent German sculptress, Elisabeth Ney." Records in London also indicate that Montgomery remained there until i November 1863, only seven days before his recorded marriage. As Stephens points out, Montgomery had enough time to get from London to Madeira, but not enough to establish any kind of practice on the island. Thus Stephens reasons that during her second stay in London, Ney and Montgomery probably decided to marry. Ney may have preceded the doctor to Madeira, making arrangements for their household needs, and when he had completed his duties Montgomery followed her, going to the British consul's office to be married shortly after his arrival in Funchal.28 Ney's distorted version of her marriage was typical of the way she regularly treated her relationship with Montgomery. Probably all her friends realized the physician was her husband, but she apparently believed the information was something quite private. Thus she would neglect to mention it at times when it would have been pertinent, and on official records she occasionally refused to divulge her marital status. In a letter he wrote one of Ney's friends after her death, Montgomery revealed that his wife had thus caused him a great deal of pain and had placed him in a "ridiculously false" position. He also gave an explanation for her seemingly unreasonable behavior, and his analysis undoubtedly accounts not only for the story of their marriage that Ney gave Taylor, but also for many other of her seemingly inexplicable actions. "She anxiously treated me as an outsider," he wrote, "in order to appear before the world as independent." Realizing how necessary Ney deemed her image of strength and selfsufficiency, he found consolation in their private relationship for her public attitude, one he termed a "strange weakness." "Despite the wrong she was doing me inexcusably," he was always certain that "she truly and ever most faithfully loved me, and was vitally dependent on my love in return." 29 Whatever precipitated their marriage, the couple apparently enjoyed an

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extended honeymoon, living on Madeira for several years. A popular watering place for Britain's moneyed classes, its capital city, Funchal, had acquired a reputation as a health resort, and Montgomery did eventually establish an extensive practice among the many wealthy invalids who sought cures there. Ney also resumed her professional activities. She established a studio in Funchal, yet unlike Montgomery she apparently did not profit from the wealthy Europeans who flocked to the city. Only two portraits are known from this period, yet the two works are significant pieces. 30 One of these was a portrait of John William Spencer Egerton-Cust, the second earl of Brownlow, and it introduced a new type of portraiture, the full-length statuette, to Ney's ouevre. The genre became important in the early nineteenth century with the depiction of famous contemporary personalities, and the statuette's sphere expanded through the decades to include historical personages and patrons as well. By the mid-nineteenth century, the demand for small sculptures had become so great that critics began to decry the "deluge of statuettes," but the outcry failed to stop their popularity with the public. Their small size and relatively small expense had given statuettes mass appeal, and they became popular ornaments in cluttered Restoration and Victorian interiors. 3 1 Ney was not trying to capitalize on the demand for statuettes with the Brownlow portrait, however: the earl was hardly a public figure, and as a quiet British aristocrat he probably would not have been pleased with its commercial reproduction. Ney's choice of the statuette genre possibly had more to do with its domestic nature. Like many small sculptures of the period, the portrait of Lord Brownlow is an intimate and informal portrayal intended for private enjoyment rather than public display. Unlike Ney's other works, particularly the full-length statues for Miinster, the Brownlow piece is informal in both pose and costume. Looking lost in contemplation, the young man stands in a relaxed, thoughtful pose. The somber face is slightly turned and rests upon his raised right hand; the free left leg, which extends away from his body, is set upon a raised portion of the base, giving the figure a look of grace and ease generally lacking in Ney's public work. Rather than official or formal costume, Brownlow wears what appears to be an old jacket and trousers; the clothing drapes in soft folds and creases, indicating age and frequent wear. The statuette is thus a study in casual elegance, underscored by the work's subtly intricate composition. Even when viewed from varying angles, the sculpture is, according to neoclassic canon, successfully balanced and contained. From one view, for

38

example, Brownlow's left arm as it crosses his chest counters the extension of his left leg, thus restraining any implied motion. From another angle, the slanting line that extends from the left foot through the lower leg, up the open jacket, and into the tilted head is balanced by the opposing line of Brownlow's right arm as it reaches toward his face and the parallel angles of his left lapel and upper left arm. The design is such that the statuette could be picked up and turned around or certainly placed on a table where it might be viewed from more than one side. Thus in this piece, Ney was extending her skill with full-length figures beyond the rather elementary positions of the Miinster statues. She was also revealing for the first time a real concern for psychological insight. Brownlow's quiet, introspective look, his self-contained pose and gestures, speak of the young man's life as an invalid. A victim of tuberculosis, Brownlow led a lonely and rootless existence, moving from one health resort to another until his death in 1867, four years after Ney completed his portrait. 32 Given Ney's seeming penchant for "great men" and the publicity that accompanied her modeling them, the care and skill she used in sculpting the little-known Lord Brownlow might seem out of character. In his travels, however, Brownlow was accompanied by his mother, Lady Marian Alford, one of the most important patrons of sculptors in the mid-nineteenth century. Through the years Lady Alford had helped numerous artists, but the major recipients of her largesse had been the British neoclassic sculptor John Gibson and his American protegee Harriet Hosmer. In 1861, just two years before she met Ney in Madeira, Lady Alford had commissioned an important work, the Siren Fountain, from Hosmer and a figure of Pandora from Gibson. Both of these sculptures, and the high prices paid for them, had been well publicized. Thus Ney undoubtedly knew she had encountered a potentially valuable patron. Lady Alford, however, was apparently not as impressed with Ney's talents as she was with those of the Englishman and the American woman. Aside from the statuette of her son, apparently the only work Ney completed for the British noblewoman was Lady Alford's own portrait in a miniature bust. For this piece, legend has it, Ney received a black dress with gold embroidery rather than a large sum of money.33 With so little encouragement, Ney seems to have eventually given up any idea she might have entertained of developing a clientele among the wealthy inhabitants of Madeira. Turning from the domestic sphere, she again looked to the world of public figures to make her fame. The great persons of the 1860s, however, were unlike those she had portrayed in the

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1850s. Men of action, rather than artists and philosophers, now dominated the public mind, and for Ney this change would have important consequences. Although at one time Elisabet Ney had accepted Schopenhauer's belief that politics was not a worthwhile occupation, the pursuit of her career apparently led her to either forget or disregard his advice. Because of her ambitions, she found herself, intentionally or not, involved in politics, a world that her ideas about a "lofty and creative soul" perhaps made her ill equipped to understand.

40

3. A Revolutionary andaKinQ

m. M.nnn t n e Spring of 1864, as Elisabet Ney was working in her Madeira studio, the Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, visiting England ostensibly to obtain medical advice, was publicizing his cause and conquering the London social scene. The Times, reporting on his tour, recorded that "such a welcome . . . had never before been known." As his biographer Christopher Hibbert states, "everyone flocked to him from the Prince of Wales to the Archbishop of Canterbury; workingmen cheered him till they were hoarse; ladies fainted at the sight of him." Although the fame of the Italian has waxed and waned through the decades, Hibbert is probably not far wrong when he states that in the 1860s "Garibaldi was perhaps, the best-known name in the world." Streets and squares "in a hundred different towns from Naples to Montevideo" bore his name; his likeness could be found in cities as far apart as Boston and Bologna; one "could drink a Garibaldi wine, wear a Garibaldi blouse, see a Garibaldi musical, eat a Garibaldi biscuit."1 His reputation, no doubt, had spread even to Madeira. In 1865 Garibaldi was back in temporary exile at his home on Caprera, a tiny island off the northeast coast of Sardinia, and Elisabet Ney was on her way to visit him and ask permission to model his bust. As the journal of her expedition indicates, she arrived at Maddalena, the island neighboring Caprera, on Sunday 5 May and immediately set out to persuade the general to sit for her. Garibaldi had apparently been warned that she might come; somewhere in her travels Ney had met Maria Esperance, the baroness von Schwartz, a romantic novelist and travel writer and later the translator of Garibaldi's memoirs as well as his lover. Madame Schwartz, as Ney referred to her in her journal, had spoken of the sculptor to Garibaldi and asked whether she might model his bust. Madame Schwartz had never

4i

relayed an answer to Ney, and when Ney asked Garibaldi himself what his answer had been he replied, "I said no." 2 Not to be dissuaded, Ney countered, "I expected that; I would have done the same." As she wrote in her journal, she then claimed, "I did not wish her to ask you, only to speak of me and my intention. I came to fetch the answer myself, will you refuse me to do it?" When the general inquired how long he must pose and seemed reluctant to grant the eight hours she required, Ney became more flattering and persuasive. "It is more than two years that I exidingly wished to do your bust," Ney recorded that she replied. "None is well done of the portraits, I saw." She spoke of the distance she had traveled: "I have crossed now Portugal, Spain, and France to come to here to ask you to sit for me to do a bust," and she added, "I know I will do it well; what answer will you give me?" Garibaldi, apparently impressed with her determination, agreed he would sit, and after making arrangements to begin her work the next day, Ney took her leave. As she reached the door Ney turned to Garibaldi and said, "I beg you will not think of me as taking great liberties." Because he had difficulty understanding English, it took the general a while to respond. He finally answered, however, with a gesture rather than words. As Ney wrote in her journal, he shook "with the kindest expression his mighty looking head, leafted forwards his head and I, understanding this movement, bowed down my forehead and received a gentle, serious kiss," a "guarantee," she believed, that she was "now really welcome." Ney's journal indicates that she worked on Garibaldi's bust for at least two weeks. Her first few sessions with the general were brief: after a short time he would begin to look melancholy, and his mood would make Ney uneasy about her work. She seems to have inspired his trust, however, when he questioned her about what she intended to do with his bust. When she replied that she would never consider making a profit from it but would have a marble copy made for any of his good friends, charging only for her own expenses, he was "astonished." From that time on he was more cooperative, and when she requested it he allowed her to relinquish her rooms at Maddalena, to which she had been traveling back and forth every day on a small boat, and to join his household at Caprera. Even after she began to gain his trust, however, Garibaldi was apparently never very responsive to Ney during their modeling sessions. Restive under her scrutiny and unused to the techniques of sculpture, he still became melancholy and withdrawn within a few minutes. Once she settled in at Caprera, however, Ney began to take walks around the island with the

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general and occasionally joined him in the fields in the morning. During these outings she found that "his mistrust and doubts seem to fade more and more," and she in turn grew more sympathetic to the exiled leader and his aims. As she wrote in her journal, she too was overcome with "melancholy" from "seeing a being, gifted with so sublime gifts and using them with so great fidelity, put away from its proper place among mankind." Sensing her sympathy, Garibaldi "began to speak about his hopes for Italy" and to reveal his frustrations with those in power. At times his comments to her took on a more personal tone. One morning in his garden the general confessed to Ney that she interested him very much and that he sometimes awoke in the night thinking about her and making "great inquiries into [her] character." "Votre physiognomie est tres bonne," he told her, without explaining what her looks had to do with her character. Apparently not sensing anything but the most lofty thoughts on Garibaldi's part, Ney responded, "If so, then this is the sympathy I have with you." Ney's journal reports several such encounters as she and the general wandered over Caprera's rocky acres, the last occurring after she had been there about two weeks. On that occasion the sculptor accompanied Garibaldi as he went to feed his flock of ducks, and she was thoroughly entranced with the general's easy communication with nature. "Like a child," she wrote, "he abandons himself to it." When they came close to the pond, the ducks came running to meet them. "Seeing him acting the part of providence toward these helpless, stupid creatures," Ney cried out, "Canards, regardez votre Dieu!" This exclamation, the sculptor recorded, seemed to "strike him as an opening on my soul and he turned to me with a deep expressive look and nodding his head, he answered, 'C'est vrais!'" The exchange left Ney herself with a feeling of melancholy, and she wondered sadly what providence would allow such a "higher being" to be crushed by "sin and lowness." Sensing her mood, Garibaldi sat beside her and said, "Oui, vous comprend moi, vous—avez de pitie, de simpathy avec moi. Ce me fait beaucoup de plaisir, parsque j'esteem vous beaucoup." The sculptor replied with comments that gave further evidence of her sympathy. She burned "with scorn," she told the general, "for those who had condemned him to lead this life," and trying to console him, she compared him to the Titan who had brought fire to man, "the old chained Prometheus." The comparison, Ney noted, pleased Garibaldi, as did her other comments, yet soon after their conversation she left him to return to her own work. The next notations in Ney's journal indicate that something may have been troubling her, and she made comments that those people most inter-

A Revolutionary and a King 43

ested in the sensational aspects of her life would no doubt have found tantalizing. "Sometimes before when he had come to me and I gave him my hand," she wrote, "he repeated as on the first evening! giving a serious kiss on my forehead, and so today, placing his hand on my shoulder." Then the journal, which Ney had kept so diligently for nearly two weeks, ended abruptly. Stopping in the middle of a word, Ney closed her account with the remark, presumably about the kiss she had received, "—Strange an. . . ." The rest of her notebook is filled with blank pages. Although Ney left no further record of her thoughts and did not explain why she discontinued her journal, information about Garibaldi's methods and character perhaps reveals the nature of her situation at Caprera. As Christopher Hibbert, the Italian's biographer, has shown, Garibaldi was a man with an "impulsive sexual appetite" who felt little compunction about using women to satisfy either physical or political needs. Garibaldi's friend and early biographer, the Englishwoman Jessie White, also wrote of his manipulation of admirers, claiming that once a person had expressed devotion to the leader and his cause, he felt free to use him or her in any way he liked. "He had a special method of his own," she said, "for pressing the juice from the grapes and throwing away the skins."3 No evidence exists, however, that Ney and Garibaldi became lovers. As comments she made at the very beginning of her journal reveal, such a situation would have been out of character for her. As she recounted, on her journey to Maddalena she had become friendly with the ship's captain, a man named Carranza. He knew Garibaldi well, and once he learned her destination, he told Ney that it was very likely she would fall in love with the general. Ney's reply was typical of how she reacted to such suggestions. "No certainly not," her journal reports that she said. "My esteem and admiration is unusual great for him, [and] they will grow I hope in knowing him." She went on to explain that because these sentiments, like her devotion to art, were "very deep and true," "no other feeling" could exist. For Ney, the artist with a "lofty soul," personal involvement would debase her mission; she considered her ideals too noble and pure to be tainted by something as lowly as what in later years she would term "animal instinct."4 A master of flattery herself, Ney in this instance may well have been its victim. Although her journal indicates that she truly did admire Garibaldi, it also shows that she was not in the least reticent about revealing her feelings to the general in hopes of obtaining a more willing subject. Ironically, however, by attempting to manipulate him, Ney gave Garibaldi the means of manipulating her. By revealing her sympathy for his plight, her

44

identification of him with "virtue and sublimness" and of his enemies with "sin and lowness," she made herself a perfect target for his seductions. If she did not succumb to what her journal's reader can, with the perspective of history, see as physical advances, she probably fell for his appeal to her "higher nature." Despite whatever misgivings or caution Ney may have felt as she concluded her journal, her relationship with Garibaldi did not come to a similarly abrupt end. Indeed, she remained at Caprera long enough to complete her bust and also a statuette of the Italian general, and these two works perhaps indicate the high esteem in which Ney still held the hero. Early in her stay the sculptor had watched Garibaldi as he addressed his household and guests during one of their meals, and she found him, as he rose, a "very animated" speaker. Because she could not understand his Italian, she was all the more aware of "how grand and brilliant his features were. That was the spirit," she wrote in her journal, "I have to reproduct in the bust." Unfortunately, although Ney's words sound as if she wished to portray the lively, charismatic aspect of Garibaldi's appearance, the words "grand and brilliant" had another meaning for her. True to her training, Ney's portraits of the general are more restrained than her journal seems to indicate. Rather than depicting the Romantic side of Garibaldi's nature, they more closely capture her response as she later watched the general walking in his fields. "How surprising it is to meet in nature," she recorded; "this strait lines of a classical shaped face and the brilliancy of expression surpassing that of the old heros in their statues."5 Thus the bust, as well as the statuette, reflects Ney's idealization of her all-too-human subject. For that reason, although they may have filled their creator's aims for them, the pieces are perhaps among her least successful works. Although an accurate likeness, Ney's bust of Garibaldi is, in comparison with many of her other portraits, cold and lifeless (fig. n ) . Garibaldi was well known for his calm demeanor, but underlying that facade was a very vital and charismatic personality. In Ney's portrait, however, little of the dynamism shows through: the general's face is an impenetrable mask that reveals little of the personality and animation so obvious in photographs taken about the same time. Whereas in those informal portraits, for example, Garibaldi usually engages the viewer in a rather intense stare, in Ney's bust he gazes straight through. None of the intensity apparent in at least one photograph taken on Caprera comes through in the sculpture. Part of the stiffness may result from Garibaldi's discomfort at posing, of which Ney so frequently complained. Because the general was usually unresponsive to her during his sittings, she may have been unable to capture her

A Revolutionary and a King 45

k •

' : " *"
*^*fe;

/:i&?*F?6*-\

%V f f ' > ,'"' „ */. ''• draft of letter, Ney to [George] Littlefield, 24 June 1897, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC.

5. Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880's to 1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), pp. 54—55; Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800—1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), pp. 180— 208, 246; see also, Welter, "Cult of True Womanhood"; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; Gerda Lerner, "Introduction," in The Female Experience: An American Documentary, American Heritage Series (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977); Mary Beth Rogers, Texas Women: A Celebration of History (Austin: Texas Foundation for Women's Resources, 1981), pp. 14—23. 6. Horowitz, Culture and the City, pp. 50-54. 7. Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), p. 27; Anna J. H. Pennybacker, Foreword, in The History of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, ed. Stella L. Christian (Houston: Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, 1919), p. ix. 8. History of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, pp. 53, 66. 9. "The State Council," Dallas Morning News, 3 November 1894, p. 4. 10. "The Mission of Art," unpublished manuscript, Collection of Helen Frantz, Austin, Texas. 11. Drafts of letters, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; Ney to Lucadia Pease, n.d., A-TC; Ney to Maggie Houston Williams, 16 May 1897, ITC. 12. William H. Gerdts, American Neo-classic Sculpture: The Marble Resurrection (New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 104-5; " O n Thursday afternoon . . . ," Austin Daily Statesman, 4 April 1897, p. 16; Ney to Rebecca J. Fisher, 25 April 1897, AHC; drafts of letters, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC. 13. Draft of letter, Ney to May Penn McKeever, 24 April 1897, 1897

246

notebook, n.p., HRC; draft of letter, Ney to Mrs. Thomas Tinsley, 3 May 1897, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC. 14. Draft of letter, Ney to Benedette Tobin, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC. 15. Draft of letter, Ney to McKeever, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC. 16. Ibid. 17. Printed legal settlement between Elisabet Ney et al. vs. Benedette Tobin et al., 4 June 1898, HRC. 18. Ney to Lucadia Pease, 9 July 1897, ENM; drafts of letters, Ney to Lucadia Pease, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; drafts of letters, Ney to Julia Pease, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; drafts of letters, Ney to Mosle, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; Ney to Julia Pease, 2 July 1898, A-TC; Ney to Nannie Huddle, 10 August 1898, ENM. 19. Ney to Adele Burleson, 8 December 1899, HRC; Bride Taylor to Laura Bryan Parker, 12 January 1900, HRC; Arthur Lefevre to Ney, 3 November 1898, ENM; Lefevre to Ney, 16 November 1898, ENM, "The University Alumni," Austin Daily Statesman, 20 February 1899, p. 3; "The Alumni Association," Austin Daily Statesman, 19 March 1899, p. 5; Lefevre to Ney, 10 June 1900, ENM; Ney to Clarence Miller, 25 October 1905, HRC. Ney collected only a small portion of the $500 she had been promised for the execution of the Palm bust; she paid for the marble copy of Roberts's bust herself. 20. Draft of letter, Ney to James Stephen Hogg, n.d., 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; notice of lecture by W. J. Bryan, Austin Daily Statesman, 16 January 1897, p. 4; draft of letter, Ney to Lubbock, 1897 notebook, n.p., HRC; James Stephen Hogg to Ney, 15 February 1897, Hogg Collection, BTHC. 21. Ney to William Jennings Bryan, 28 May 1897, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Library of Congress. 22. Ney to Laura Bryan Parker, 5 April 1900, HRC. 23. Program, National Federation of Women's Clubs Annual Convention, 3—12 May 1904, Baltimore, Maryland, ENM. 24. Ella Dibrell to Ney, 3 May 1900, ENM. 25. Ibid.; regular session of the Twenty-seventh Legislature, 8 January to 9 April 1901, Miscellaneous Appropriations, p. 248, GammelVs haws of Texas, vol. 11, 1898—1901; Second Called Session, Twenty-seventh Legislature, 5 September 1901 to 1 October 1901, Miscellaneous Appropriations, p. 44, GammelVs Laws of Texas, vol. 11, 1898-1901. 26. Ney to Joseph Dibrell, 6 June 1901, ENM; Ney to Joseph Sayers, 10 June 1901, Ney Papers, Texas State Archives (TSA); Ney to Joseph Sayers, 14 July 1901, TSA; Ney to Joseph Sayers, 23 July 1901, TSA; Ney to Joseph Sayers, 27 July 1901, TSA. 27. Ney to Dibrell, 6 June 1901, ENM; the actual contract between Ney and the DRT was not completed until August 1902; a copy of the contract stipulat-

Notes to Pages 1 7 7 - 8 7

2.47

ing that Ney would be paid $4,000 is in the Ney Collection, HRC; see also, Ney to Ella Dibrell, 7 April 1902, ENM; Ney to Ella Dibrell, 29 October 1901, ENM; Ney to Ella Dibrell, 10 November 1901, ENM. 28. "Honor Albert Sidney Johnston," Austin Daily Statesman, 28 September 1892, p. 4; Second Called Session, Twenty-seventh Legislature, 5 September 1901 to 1 October 1901, Appropriations of Public Buildings and Grounds, pp. 4 1 - 4 2 , GammelVs Laws of Texas, vol. 11, 1898-1901. 29. Ney to Ella Dibrell, 29 October 1901, ENM; Ney to Dibrell, 10 November 1901, ENM. 30. Ney to Joseph Sayers, 7 January 1902, Sayers Papers, TSA. 31. Ney to Joseph Sayers, n.d., Sayers Collection, TSA. 32. Ney to Adelia Dunovant, 7 January 1902, Sayers Papers, TSA; Adelia Dunovant to Joseph Sayers, 29 April 1902, Sayers Papers, TSA. 33. Ney to Joseph Sayers, n.d., Ney Papers, TSA. 34. Ney to Adelia Dunovant, 2 May 1902, Ney Papers, TSA. 35. Adelia Dunovant to Ney, 16 June 1902, Ney Papers, TSA. 36. Ney to Dunovant, 2 May 1902; Dunovant to Ney, 16 June 1902, TSA. 37. Ney to Joseph Sayers, 3 August 1902, Ney Papers, TSA; Ney to Ella Dibrell, 3 October 1902, ENM; contract for Albert Sidney Johnston memorial, executed between Elisabet Ney and Joseph Sayers, 2 December 1902, HRC. 38. Ney to Thomas Taylor, 5 October 1902, ENM. 39. Ney to Ella Dibrell, 13 October 1902, ENM; Ney to Dibrell, 18 November 1902, ENM. 40. Ney to Dibrell, 18 November 1902, ENM; Ney to Dibrell, 13 December 1902, E N M .

41. Ney to Dibrell, 1 October 1902, ENM. 42. Ibid. 43. Ney to Dibrell, 5 January 1903, HRC. 44. "The Unveiling Ceremonies," Austin Daily Statesman, 20 January 1903, n.p.; Ney to Dibrell, 5 January 1903, HRC. CHAPTER ELEVEN

i. Ney to Taylor, 3 May [1904], ENM. 2. Ney to Dibrell, 8 December 1903, ENM. 3. Taylor to Dibrell, 7 March 1903, HRC. 4. Clarence Miller, "People's Forum," Austin Daily Statesman, 10 March 1903, n.p.; Maggie Houston Williams to Ney, 20 March 1903, HRC; translation, Julius Schutze, "An Answer to Judge Reagan," Texas Vorwarts, 6 March 1903, HRC.

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5. Taylor to Dibrell, 7 March 1903, HRC. 6. Ney to Taylor, n.d., HRC; Miscellaneous Appropriations, First Called Session, Twenty-eighth Legislature, 2 April to 1 May 1903, GammelVs Laws of Texas, vol. 12, 1902-5, p. 73. 7. Ney to Dibrell, 6 August 1903, ENM. 8. Ney to Dibrell, 5 August 1903, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 8 December 1903, ENM.

9. Ney to Taylor, 5 October 1903, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 8 December 1903. 10. Ney to Hally Bryan Perry, 6 December 1903, ENM; Ney to Dibrell, 8 December 1903, HRC. 11. Ney to Dibrell, 8 December 1903, ENM. 12. Ney to Hally Bryan Perry, 1 January 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 8 December 1903, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 31 January 1904, HRC. 13. Ney to Taylor, 7 February 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 5 October 1903, HRC; Ney to Louis Wortham, 9 March 1904, HRC. Ultimately, the marble version of Albert Sidney Johnston appeared in the Palace of Fine Arts as Ney wished, and the plaster model was placed in the Texas building. 14. Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 214—15. 15. Ney to Taylor, 13 March 1904, HRC; Taft, American Sculpture, p. 215. 16. Ney to Taylor, 31 January 1904, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 7 February 1904, HRC.

17. Ney to Taylor, 7 February 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 13 February 1904, HRC.

18. Ney to Taylor, 27 March 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 9 May 1904, HRC. 19. Ney to Dibrell, 1 February 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 26 March 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 2 April 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 14 May 1904, ENM. 20. "Mistress of Her Art," Washington Post, 22 May 1904, part 4, p. 1. 21. Ibid.; Ney to Taylor, 14 May 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 18 May 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 21 May 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 23 May, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 26 May 1904, ENM. 22. Ney to Taylor, 18 May 1904, ENM. 23. Ney to Taylor, 31 May 1904, HRC. 24. Ney to unidentified correspondent, n.d., ENM. 25. Certificate for bronze medal, St. Louis Exposition, 1904, ENM. 26. Ney to Taylor, 5 October 1903, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 26 February 1905, HRC.

27. Clipping, Austin Daily Statesman, 22 June 1904, n.p., HRC. 28. Bride Taylor to Ella Dibrell, 17 February 1905, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 26 February 1905, HRC; Thomas Reese to Ney, 1 March 1905, HRC.

Notes to Pages 1 8 8 - 2 0 9

2

49

29. Ney to Dibrell, 16 October 1905, HRC; Committee on the Albert Sidney Johnston Monument to Ney, 15 August 1905, HRC. 30. "Miss Ney Declines to Make Changes," Austin Daily Statesman, 8 October 1905, n.p. 31. Ibid. 32. Ney to Dibrell, 16 January 1906, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 4 April 1906, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 22 June 1906, HRC. 33. Loggins, Two Romantics, p. 328; Taylor, Ney, p. 42 34. Ney to Dibrell, 3 October 1900, ENM; Ney to Dibrell, 13 October 1902, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 31 January 1904, HRC; Ney to Taylor, 7 February 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 2 April 1904; Ney to Taylor, 14 May 1904, ENM; Ney to Taylor, 18 May 1904, ENM. 35. Ney to Dibrell, 1905, HRC; Ney to Dibrell, 16 October 1905, HRC. 36. Ney to Dibrell, 4 April 1906, HRC. 37. Pinson, Modern Germany, pp. 9—10, 44. 38. Ernestine Schumann-Heink to Ney, 8 May 1903, HRC. 39. Fragment of letter, Ney to Schumann-Heink, n.d., HRC; SchumannHeink to Ney, 26 May 1903, ENM. 40. Maggie Houston Williams to Ney, 11 February 1903, HRC; Laura Bryan Parker to Ney, 3 October 1901, ENM; Dibrell to Montgomery, 4 July 1908, HRC.

41. Dorothy Reinli Sutton, "Grandmother Was Lady Macbeth," unpublished manuscript, BTHC; Rutland, Sursum, p. 138; Dibrell to Montgomery, 4 July 1908, HRC. 42. Unpublished reminiscences of Julia Runge, ENM; unpublished reminiscences of Anita Miller, AHC; Taylor, Ney, p. 85; unpublished reminiscences of Hally Bryan Perry, 24 January 1933, HRC; unpublished reminiscences of Adina de Zavala, HRC. 43. Taylor, "The Influence of the Public on the Development of American Art," address before Austin Art League, 17 October 1928, HRC. 44. Montgomery to Maria Lueder, 1 July 1907, ENM. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. EPILOGUE

i. Montgomery to Maria Lueder, 8 August 1907, cited in Stephens, Hermit Philosopher, p. 355; Montgomery to Huddle, 21 February 1908, Shaw Collection, Pacific Palisades, California; Montgomery to Julia Loeffler, 25 July 1907, HRC.

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2. Stephens, pp. 352—64; Montgomery to Huddle, 21 June 1909, Shaw Collection, Pacific Palisades, California. 3. Ibid.; Montgomery to Maria Lueder, 26 August 1909, cited in Stephens, p. 367, and Montgomery to Julia Loeffler, 25 July 1907, HRC, are two examples of letters during this period when he writes of family life. Montgomery to Ella Dibrell, 6 August 1908, HRC. Briefly, Montgomery had sold the property to a Theodore Low from Austin, and when Lome found out he went to Austin and convinced Low to give Lome other property rather than giving Montgomery cash for the Waller County plantation. See Stephens, pp. 365-67. 4. Fragment of letter from Montgomery to unidentified correspondent, 25 February 1910, HRC; Montgomery to Huddle, 21 June 1909, Shaw Collection, Pacific Palisades, California. During part of this period Lome was in Mexico. In letters to Huddle, Montgomery castigates his son for leaving his family to fend for themselves and for not going to see them immediately upon his return to Liendo. However, as sorry as he felt for Lome's wife at the time, he apparently did not particularly care for her either, for she paid little attention to the physician and tended, in Montgomery's eyes, to be as greedy as her husband. See Montgomery to Huddle, 3 November 1908,13 March 1909, 21 June 1909, Shaw Collection, Pacific Palisades, California. 5. Stephens, p. 369. 6. E. N. Barrett, 17 May 1913, HRC; Ella Dibrell to Bride Taylor, 17 June 1913, ENM; Montgomery to Thomas Taylor, 4 March 1909, HRC; copy, Last Will and Testament of Edmund Montgomery, SMU. 7. Montgomery to Maria Lueder, 8 August 1908, cited in Stephens, p. 3 5 5; Montgomery to Thomas Taylor, 27 September 1907, HRC; Ella Dibrell to Paul Carus, 15 May 1916. 8. Montgomery to Ella Dibrell, 26 February 1908, HRC. Nannie Huddle later challenged Dibrell's right to dispose of Lady Macbeth, claiming that Montgomery had actually given the statue to her. She apparently decided not to press her claim, however, when she learned the statue was being sent to Washington. See James McClendon to Ella Dibrell, 15 May 1916, HRC. 9. Montgomery to Ella Dibrell, 19 March 1908, HRC; Dibrell to Montgomery, 6 August 1908, HRC; Montgomery to Dibrell, 9 August 1908, HRC; Montgomery to Dibrell, 5 September 1908, HRC; Dibrell to Emma Burleson, 8 September 1908, HRC; Montgomery to Nannie Huddle, 13 September 1908, Shaw Collection, Pacific Palisades, California; copy of legal agreement between Edmund Montgomery and Ella and J. B. Dibrell, 4 May 1910, HRC. 10. Ella Dibrell to Clarence Owsley, 30 May 1911, HRC; brochure of Texas Fine Arts Association, 1911, ENM. 11. Unpublished reminiscences of Laura Bryan Parker, ENM.

Notes to Pages 2 0 9 - 2 3

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Biblw0mpl)fcal Essay

I . ARCHIVAL SOURCES

The most important source of archival material on Elisabet Ney is the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin. The HRC'S Elisabet Ney Collection includes extensive original material—letters, notebooks, and financial records—from Ney's European and American years. Second only to the HRC'S collection is that of the Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin Parks and Recreation Department, Austin, Texas (ENM). Although a great deal of the museum's archive consists of photocopies of material from the HRC, an important part of its collection is the correspondence of the museum's longtime curator, Willie B. Rutland, with now deceased relatives and acquaintances of Ney. Other important sources of archival material include the Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas (BTHC), the Austin History Center of the Austin Public Library (AHC), and the De Zavala Collection of the Texas State Archives (TSA). The Fikes Hall of Special Collections and DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (SMU), hold the collection of Montgomery's biographer Ira K. Stephens. This archive is primarily interesting for Stephens's voluminous correspondence with friends and acquaintances of Ney and Montgomery. The Ney-Montgomery Papers in the Texas Collection at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, though not extensive, contain some highly significant items, such as the diaries Ney kept in 1865 and 1869. The following is a complete list of the collections consulted: Austin History Center of the Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas: Crusemann Papers Bickler Papers Fischer Papers

2-53

Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas: Mary Jourdan Atkinson Papers William J. Battle Papers Beauregard Bryan Papers Guy Morrison Bryan Papers Margaret Sealy Burton Papers James Stephen Hogg Papers Elisabet Ney Papers Arthur Lefevre Papers Anna J. Penny backer Papers Oran Roberts Papers Bride Neill Taylor Papers Daughters of the Republic of Texas Museum, Austin, Texas: Elisabet Ney Papers Fikes Hall of Special Collections and DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas: Edmund Montgomery Papers Ira Stephens Papers Elisabet Ney Museum, City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department, Austin, Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas: Elisabet Ney Papers Special Collections, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas: Henry J. Rosenberg Family Papers Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas: Ney-Montgomery Papers Texas State Archives, De Zavala Collection, Austin, Texas: Elisabet Ney Papers Joseph D. Sayers Papers University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, Texas: Elisabet Ney Collection Witte Museum, San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, Texas: Elisabet Ney Papers Private collections: Mrs. Ralph Bickler, Austin, Texas J. P. Bryan, Houston, Texas Emily F. Cutrer, Austin, Texas Helen Frantz, Austin, Texas Martha L. Shaw, Pacific Palisades, California

2-54

2 . BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Except when dealing with archival material about Ney, one often finds it difficult to separate the primary sources from the secondary sources. Although a book or article about the sculptor might customarily be regarded as secondary, it could also be considered a primary source for what it reveals about Ney's image and persona. Nowhere is this situation more obvious than in the handful of biographies about the sculptor. The first of these, Bride Taylor's Elisabet Ney: Sculptor (Austin: Thomas F. Taylor, 1938), is not a reliable source of factual information, but it is very useful as an insight into what Ney's contemporaries thought of the sculptor and what they believed was the truth about her life. Three later biographies, Jan Fortune and Jean Burton, Elisabet Ney (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1943), Vernon Loggins, Two Romantics and Their Ideal Life (New York: Odyssey Press, 1946), and Marjory Goar, Marble Dust: A Biography of Elisabet Ney (Austin: Eakin Press, 1984), are more like novels than straightforward biographies. Thus their details, even when footnoted, are extremely unreliable, but their general romanticized tone and themes are significant. They are examples of the problem Ney phophesied in comments about the negative effect of being a public personality: one is more likely to be known by the sensational aspects of one's life than for one's true accomplishments. Two Ney biographies have appeared in German. The first, by Eugen Muller, Elisabet Ney (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1931), is important because it reproduces documents that were destroyed during World War II. The other, Jo van Ammers-Kuller, Diana: Lebensgeschichte der Bildhauerin Elisabet Ney, 1833-1907 (Zurich: Sansouci, i960), is fairly well researched, but like most of the books on Ney it tends to perpetuate unfounded myths and rumors. Shorter biographical treatments, such as those in Anne Fears Crawford and Crystal Sasse Ragsdale, Women in Texas (Burnet, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1982), and Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present (New York: Avon Books, 1982), generally repeat the errors and misrepresentations found in the book-length studies. Because of the scope of their projects, these authors were, unfortunately, dependent on secondary sources, as was Alessandra Comini in her essay, "Who Ever Heard of a Woman Sculptor? Harriet Hosmer, Elisabet Ney, and the Nineteenth Century Dialogue with the Three-Dimensional," in American Women Artists, 183 0—193 0 (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987). The numerous other anthologized pieces and newspaper articles, a listing of which would be virtually endless, are similarly unreliable. The only scholarly treatments of Ney are Sarah Lee Norman Wood, "The Heroic Image: Three Sculptures by Elisabet Ney" (master's thesis, Univer-

Bibliographical Essay

255

sity of Texas at Austin, August 1978), Emily Martin Fourmy, "The Art of the Woman: The Life and Work of Elisabet Ney (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1986), upon which this book is based, and Ursula Zehm, Karl Arndt, and Jiirgen Doring, "Plastische Portrats aus dem besitz der Universitat Gottingen," Niederdeutsche Beitrage zur Kunstgeschichte 25 (1986): 193—208. The following books contain significant comments upon Ney and document her activities in Europe: Jakob Baechtolds and Emil Ermatinger, eds., Gottfried Kellers: Leben, Briefe and Tagebucher (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta'ssche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1925); Nora Bickley, ed., Letters from and to Joseph Joachim (London: Macmillan, 1914); Herman Hiiffer, Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin: Ernst Sieper, 1912); Sir John Simon, Personal Recollections (London: Sir John Simon, 1894); Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebucher (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1869); and Julia Wirth, Julius Stockhausen: Der Sanger des deutschen Liedes (Frankfurt am Main: Englert und Schlosser, 1927). Reliable, scholarly sources on Montgomery are Ira Stephens, The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1951) and Morris Keeton, The Philosophy of Edmund Montgomery (Dallas: University Press, 1950). For information on the political, social, and cultural background of Ney's life in Germany, the following are standard surveys: Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1982), Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969), and Koppel Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Heinrich von Treitschke was one of nineteenth-century Germany's most important historians, and his descriptions of the cultural situation in midcentury Prussia are particularly pertinent to Ney's experience. Selections of his work are readily accessible in History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century: Selections from the Translation of Eden and Cedar Paul, ed. Gordon Craig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Henry Hatfield's Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) analyzes the literary context of many of Ney's philosophical and artistic ideas. Peter Jelavich's Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance, 1890-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Max Spindler, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1967—75) are helpful on Munich culture. For information about German emigration to the United States, see Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816—188J (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). For general information about the status of women in Germany, Priscilla Robertson's An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth Century Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982) is helpful. An

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important German source is Margrit Twillman, Die deutsche Frauenbewegung: Ihre Anfange und erste Entwicklung: 1843—1889 (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1972). Mary E. Morgan's Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff: A Woman of Letters in a Period of Transition (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981) is a straightforward biography of a woman who was perhaps a role model for Ney when she was a child, while Bertha Meyer's Salon Sketches: Biographical Studies of Berlin Salons of the Emancipation (New York: Bloch, 1938) deals with those women in Berlin who may have served as examples for the sculptor during the early years of her career. Both Hannah Arendt, Rah el Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, rev. ed., trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1974), and Ellen Key, Rah el Varnhagen (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), recount the life of one of these individuals whose experience presents interesting parallels to and divergences from Ney's own. Richard Count du Moulin-Eckert's Cosima Wagner, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1930), does not mention Ney but gives valuable insight into the artistic and intellectual circles the sculptor frequented and into the life of one of Ney's friends and contemporaries. A basic text on European art during Ney's lifetime is Fritz Novotny, The Pelican History of Art: Painting and Sculpture in Europe, IJ8 0—1880 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978). For more specific information on German art see Kermit S. Champa, German Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970), and the exhibition catalog German Masters of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981). Although both of these volumes deal with paintings and drawings rather than sculpture, they provide important insights into German aesthetic thought and the position of the artist in German society. Maurice Rheims, Nineteenth Century Sculpture, trans. Robert E. Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), Fred Licht, Sculpture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1967), and Horst W. Janson, Nineteenth Century Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), are useful surveys of European sculpture during Ney's lifetime. Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth Century Sculpture from North American Collections (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and George Braziller, 1980), brings together several very important essays on various types of sculpture and their significance during the nineteenth century. Ruth Butler Mirolli's Nineteenth Century French Sculpture: Monuments for the Middle Class (Louisville: J. B. Speed Art Museum, 1971) is a good introduction to the meaning and problems of monumental sculpture during the 1800s. For more specific information on German

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sculpture, see Horst W. Janson, "German Neoclassic Sculpture in International Perspective," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 33 (1972)14—22, and Peter Bloch and Waldemar Grzimek, Das klassiche Berlin: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule im neunzehnten ]ahrhundert (Bonn: Propylaen, 1978). Friedrich Eggers and Karl Eggers, Christian Daniel Ranch: Leben und Werke (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1891), is the standard biography of Ney's principal mentor, and Ednah D. Cheney, Life of Rauch, the Sculptor (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1893), is an American abridgement of that monumental work. Academies of Art, Past and Present (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), by Nikolaus Pevsner, is an important source for descriptions of artistic training, and Anna Mary Howitt's An Art Student in Munich (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854) provides invaluable insights into the cultural situation in Munich at approximately the time Ney was there, the opportunities for training, and the difficulties a young woman faced in attempting to undertake an art career. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Kunstler (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1909), 37 vols., is an essential reference series for biographical and bibliographical information on nineteenth-century German artists. A great deal has been written in recent years on women artists. One of the most important pioneering essays is Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker, pp. 1-37 (New York: Macmillan, 1971). This essay not only discusses the environmental obstacles to women who wish to be artists but also treats the preconception and methods of standard art history that work against women's recognition. Other significant essays that deal with the development of feminist art historical writing include Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness," Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 3-37; Gloria F. Orenstein, "Art History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Winter 1975, pp. 505-25; Mary D. Garrard, " 'Of Men, Women and Art': Some Historical Reflections," Art Journal, Summer 1976, pp. 324— 29; idem, "Feminism: Has It Changed Art History?" Heresies, Spring 1978, pp. 59-60; and H. Diane Russell, "Art History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Spring 1980, pp. 4 6 8 - 8 1 . Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974), and Karen Peterson and J. J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1976), are two early general works on women artists that are useful. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977), is also general, but the introductory essays to the catalog give important information on general

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historical trends. Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) contains a number of interesting points about the problems women artists have faced. Charlotte Streiffer Rubinstein's American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present (New York: Avon Books, 1982) contains brief biographies of most of the famous and not so famous American women artists. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) is a stimulating collection of essays that generally go beyond the stage of rediscovering women artists to exploring issues of historiography, women's imagery, and women's culture that have been so important to feminist literary scholarship. Several books dealing specifically with American women sculptors are, at this time, forthcoming. Both Charlotte Streiffer Rubinstein and Marlene Park are working on general treatments of the subject. In The White Marmorean Flock: Nineteenth Century Women Neoclassical Sculptors (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1972), William E. Gerdts discusses a group of American women artists who were active in Rome during the mid-nineteenth century. This catalog is important not only because it provides background on the problems of women sculptors, but also because Ney probably knew at least some of the group when she lived in Rome during the 1860s. Typically, however, she seems never to have mentioned them. The leading sculptor of "the White Marmorean flock" was Harriet Hosmer. Information on her may be found in Cornelia Carr, ed., Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1913), and more recently in Joseph Leach, "Harriet Hosmer: Feminist in Bronze and Marble," Feminist Art Journal 5 (Summer 1976) 19—13, 44—45, and Alicia Faxon, "Images of Women in the Sculpture of Harriet Hosmer," Women's Art Journal 2 (Spring-Summer i 9 8 i ) : 2 5 - 2 9 . Two useful cultural histories of the United States during Ney's American period are John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), and Howard Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture, 1865—1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978). An exhibition catalog, The American Renaissance, 1876—1917 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1979), includes several excellent essays dealing with the interaction between art and culture in late nineteenth-century America, and Roger Stein's John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840—1900 is still an important examination of American ideas about art, ideas that would continue to be important long beyond the end date of Stein's study. For information on the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition see David F. Burg, Chicago's White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). World's Columbian Exposition, 1893, Official

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Catalogue (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1893) *s a l s o a n important source. Lorado Taft was a prominent sculptor and critic in late nineteenth-century America, and his study The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan, 1924) is important as both a primary document and a secondary source. Like the first edition, this volume devotes several paragraphs to Ney. Although The American Renaissance, 1876—1917 contains some important insights on American sculpture during the period, the pertinent chapters in Wayne Craven's Sculpture in America, 2d ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983) are still standard. A number of works have appeared in recent years on women's lives in late nineteenth-century America. Among those most pertinent to this study are Martha Vicinus, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), and Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868—1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980). Helen Horowitz's Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880's to 1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), though not specifically about women, does deal with their role in the formation of artistic and cultural institutions. For a general survey of the lives of women in the American West, see Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800—1915, Histories of the American Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), and for some specific comparisons to Ney, see Rodman Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1972), and Maxine Benson, Martha Maxwell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Edward King's Texas, 1874: An Eyewitness Account of Conditions in PostReconstruction Texas, ed. Robert S. Gray, introduction by Joe B. Frantz (Houston: Cordovan Press, 1974) is a wonderful firsthand account of the Texas Ney encountered when she arrived during the 1870s. For information on the communities where Ney lived, see Erma Winfrey, ed., A History of Waller County, Texas (Waco: Texian Press, 1973), a volume that provides some valuable information about the economy and history of that county, and David C. Humphrey, Austin: An Illustrated History (Northridge, Calif.: Windsor, 1985), which though a commissioned piece, is remarkably accurate, insightful, and well illustrated. Glen Lich, The German Texans (San Antonio: Institute of Texan Culture, 1981), is a helpful introduction to the German settlements in Texas and provides an extensive bibliography for further research. For information on Texas women, see Ann Malone, Women on the Texas Frontier, Southwestern Studies no. 70 (El Paso: Texas Western Press,

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1980); Margaret Henson, Anglo-American Women in Texas (College Station: Texas A&cM Press, 1982), or the forthcoming revised edition of The Handbook of Texas. Until recent years, little had been done on the history of art in Texas. Both Frances Battaile Fisk, A History of Texas Artists and Sculptors (Abilene, Tex.: Frances Battaile Fisk, 1928), and Esse Forrester-O'Brien, Art and Artists of Texas (Dallas: Tandy, 1935) were pioneering efforts that are still good references to individual artists but provide little analysis or discussion of general trends. The work of James Patrick McGuire has really been pathbreaking. His book that is most pertinent to Ney is Hermann Lungkwitz: Romantic Landscapist on the Texas Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). For another view of what it was like for a foreign sculptor to arrive in Texas at the turn of the century, see the autobiography of Ney's rival Pompeo Coppini, From Dawn to Sunset (San Antonio: Nay lor, 1949). Finally, given Ney's penchant for publicity, there is probably no better source of information about the sculptor and her milieu than the newspapers of the era. The Austin Daily Statesman, of course, is the richest source, but other newspapers across the state provide important information. Among the additional papers consulted for this study were the Austin Evening News, Dallas News, Galveston News, and Houston Daily Post.

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Index

Academy of Liberal Arts, 147-50, 152, 164-65, 177, 180 Adler, Felix, 108-9, J4% Alford, Lady Marian, 39 Amateis, Louis, 166—68, 175 Anderson, L. C , 105 Arnim, Bettina von, 22 Arnold, Matthew, 178 Austin, Stephen F., 139 Austin, Stephen F. (Ney statue): commissioning of, 126-27; modeling and design of, 132, 137, 138-41, 143; marble replica in ^ Texas capitol, 147, 181-82, 187, 191, 192, 193-96; in National Statuary Hall, 181-83, 185-87,

123, 150, 168, 171; and family, 155 Bismarck, Otto von, 52-53, 65, 6 7 68, 71, 73; Ney's bust of, 51-52, 122, 127

Bacci, Cavaliere, 204-5, 2 I 1 Bavaria, political climate in 1860s, 66-68 Bayrhoffer, Theodor, 87 Berdelle, Johann Baptiste, 7, 9, 53 Berlin, 5, 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, 21, 25,

Bledsoe, P. E., 105 Bloch, Peter, 13, 14 Board of Lady Managers. See Women's World's Fair Association Bourdelle, Emile-Antoine, 15; Saint Sebastian, 15 Brackenridge, George, 150, 177 Brownlow, Lord. See Egerton-Crust, John William Spencer Bryan, Guy, 132, 137, 139 Bryan, William Jennings, 184—85; Ney's bust of, 185-86 Bulow, Cosima von. See Wagner, Cosima Liszt von Bulow Burleson, Adele, 93, 206 Burleson, Edward, 206, 208 Burleson, Emma, 153 Burleson, Rufus. See Coppini, Pompeo

30,51 Berlin Academy, 14; 1856 exhibition, 20 Bickler, Jacob, 96-97, 109, 112,

Canova, Antonio, 12 Carnegie, Andrew, 165 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 54

198, 199, 200—201, 2 0 5 , 206, 224

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Champney, J. Wells, 89 Chicago World's Fair (1893). See World's Columbian Exposition Classical humanism, 21—22 Confederate Monument (Austin), 169-75,*o8 Coppini, Pompeo, 174-75, 207; Rufus Burleson, 207 Cushman, Charlotte, 210 Custer, George A., 92 d'Angers, David, 54, 56; Paganini, Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), 144-45, 168, 181-87, 195-96, 198 Dibrell, Ella Dancy, 185-87, 196, 197, 198, 208-9, 210, 214, 215, 223-24 Dibrell, Joseph, 185, 209 d'Orleans, Marie-Christine, 29 Dress reform, 176 Droste-Hulshoff, Annette von, 5, 34; Book of the Jew, 5 Duden, Gottfried, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America, 84 Dunovant, Adelia, 188-91, 194 Durck, Karl, 122-23, 15%-59 Duval, Ella Moss, 176 Ebers, Georg, 243 Ebers, Paula, Ney's portrait medallion of, 24 3 n Egerton-Cust, John William Spencer (Lord Brownlow), Ney's statuette of, 38-39 Eggers, Friedrich, 14 Eggers, Karl, 14 Elisabet Ney Museum, 223-24 Ellenreider, Maria, 7 Enlightenment, the, 11, 20, 22; effect on sculpture, 20, 117

264

Esperance, Maria (Baroness von Schwartz), 41 Ethical Culture movement, 108-9, 148 Exposition Internationale of 1867 (Paris), 53 Feminism, Ney and, 23-24, 176-78 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 10 Fisher, Rebecca, 139 Formosa (Austin studio), 127, 1 2 8 31, 152.-53, *99, 2.21, 223-24 Fortune, Jan, 22 Franco-Prussian War (1870), 67-68, 70 Gallatzin, Amalia von, 4—5 Garibaldi, Giuseppi, 4 0 - 5 1 , 53, 64, 71, 75, 81; Ney's bust of, 45~47, 57, 122, 202; Ney's statuette of, 47,49-50,35^02 Gender, ideas of, 178-79 George V (king of Hannover), 27; Ney's bust of, 27, 201, 229n; Ney's medallion of, 163 Gibson, John, n , 39 Goar, Marjorie, 54 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13, 22, 78, 80, 84, 90, 180; Iphigenia, 63; Wanderjahre, 84 Graham, Carrie Pease, Ney's bust of, 157, 183 Graham, Marguerite, 154-55 Graham, Niles, 154—55 Greece, ideal of, 82, 90 Greek mythology, 12, 63, 78 Grimm, Jacob, 15, 18, 21, 27; Ney's bust of, 15-16, 18, 21, 27 Groce, Leonard, 91—92 Groce, Leonard, Jr., 92 Groce family, 156 Hadra, Berthold, 120

Hadra, Ida Weisselberg, 120 Hardeman, W. P., 146; Ney's bust of, 146-47, 157, 177 Harris, Anne Sutherland, 29 Harris, George, 222 Harris, Laura, 222 Hatfield, Henry, 12, 78 Haynie, Lily, 214 Hearne, Sam Houston, 196 Hegeler, E. C , 128, 206 Heine, Heinrich, Germany: A Winter Fairy Tale, 83 Helmholtz, Herman Ludwig von, 3 6 Hempstead (Texas), 98, 100; description of, 9 0 - 9 1 ; citizens' reaction to Ney, 93, n o , i n ; Montgomery's involvement with, 106, 109

Herter, Ernst, 192 Hibbert, Christopher, 41, 44 Hogg, James Stephen, 135, 184 Hogg, Sallie, 135 Holborn, Hajo, 25 Holderbaum, James, 56 Holland, Annie, 147 Holland, James K., 147 Hosmer, Harriet, n , 14, 21, 39, 50, 210

Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 12, 25; George Washington, 133; Voltaire, 25 Houston, Sam, 91, 198; proposed monument to, 146 Houston, Sam (Ney statue): commissioning of, 126; modeling and design of, 132-36, 139-41; in state capitol, 147, 181-82, 188, 1 9 1 96, 197; in National Statuary Hall, 186-88, 200-201, 205, 206 Howitt, Anna Mary, 8-9 Huddle, Nannie, 150, 151, 152, 155-56, 181,215, 223-24

Huddle, William Henry, 150, 155 Huffer, Hermann, 34-36 Humboldt, Alexander von, 21 Iglehart, D. T. (Ney bust), 200 Iwonski, Carl von, 114 Jesus Christ (Ney bust), 205, 206 Joachim, Joseph, 27, 30; Ney's bust of, 27 Johnston, Albert Sidney, Ney's memorial to, 187-91, 197, 200, 2 0 2 - 3 , 2 0 4 - 5 , 2 ° 7 ? 2.08—11

Kapp, Christian, 9-10 Kapp, Johanna, 9 Kaulbach, Friedrich, 27-29; Vartiste (portrait of Ney), 27-29 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 7, 24 King, Edward, 89 Kirby, Helen Marr, Ney's portrait of, 200

Kobell, Luise von, 59 Lady Macbeth (Ney statue), 210—17, 220, 223. See also Macbeth Lanham, S.W.T., 209 LeGrange, Leon, 6 Leisewitz, Henrietta, 94, 98 Leisewitz, Robert, 90, 91, 92, 95; family of, 93, 103, 120 Liebig, Justus von, 56-57, 64; Ney's bust of, 54, 56-57, 5 8 Liendo plantation, 91-92, 9 4 - 9 7 , 128, 222; attraction for Ney, 91, 99; family life at, 93-94, 100, 103; as a financial burden, 101, 128, 183; as problem for Ney, 164 Liszt, Franz, 30 Littlefield, George, 178

Index

265

Loggins, Vernon, 22, 52-53, 54, 71, 81, 210, 211

Looscan, Adele, 145-46, 147, 168 Lubbock, Francis, 157, 184; Ney's bust of, 157 Ludwig I, 8 Ludwig II, 7, 54, 57, 109, 162-63; and Ney, 57~59, 6 2 - 6 8 , 74~75, 211-12; and politics, 53, 6 6 - 6 8 ; Ney's statue of, 57-59, 62-69, 122, 137, 158, 1 6 1 , 2 0 1 , 207

Lungkwitz, Hermann, 114 Macbeth, 216. See also Lady Macbeth (Ney statue) McCleary, R. E., 2 McKeever, May Penn, 183 McNeill, Duncan, 9 Maximillian I, 8 Miller, Anita, 93 Miller, Clarence, 93, 164, 198 Moleschott, Jacob, 10 Montgomery, Arthur: birth of, 86, 88; death of, 92, 93 Montgomery, Daisy Tompkins, 1 3 7 38 Montgomery, Edmund: departure from Europe, 70; education, 10, 36; family background, 10—n; finances, 158; health, 85, 87, 90; last years, 221-24, 2 5 i n ; a t Liendo, 9 3 - 9 5 , 164; marriage, 36-37; medical practice, 36-37; relationship with Ney, 9—11, 18, 24, 35, 82, 86, 107, 220, 221; philosophic ideas, 103-4; political ideas, 106-7; public service in Texas, 105—7; scientific pursuits, 93, 103-4, x ^ 4 ; in Thomasville, 85-88 Montgomery, Isabella, 9 Montgomery, Lome: as an adult, 199, 221—24; birth of, 87, 88; bust of, 100-101; childhood,

266

98-100; education, 100-103, 131-32; marriages, 137-38; relationship with mother, 97-103, 112, 122, 1 3 7 - 3 8

Monument to the Heroes of 1836 (Galveston), 165-68 Monuments in Texas: interest in, 144-47, 168-69, 178, 187. See also Confederate Monument; Monument to the Heroes of 1836 Miiller, Bishop Georg Johann, 6, 15, 25,30 Munich: artistic life in, 8-9, 53; description of, 6—9 Munich Academy, 7 - 8 , n , 24 Munich Polytechnikum, 73; Ney's commissions, 53—57 Minister, Westphalia, 4, 5, 6, 8, n , I 5? 38, 39; parliament commission, 30-36; proposed Furstenberg monument, 3 5 National Statuary Hall (Washington, D.C.), 181. See also Austin, Stephen F. (Ney statue); Houston, Sam (Ney statue) Naturalism, 13 Neoclassicism, 11-12, 14; use of in Ney's sculpture, 35, 5 0 - 5 1 , 56, 1 3 3 , 212

Neureuther, Gottfried, 7, 53, 57-58, 62, 67, 72-~73 Ney, Anna Elisabeth Wernze, 4, 5 Ney, Elisabet: appearance, 5, 30, 109—10, 151—52, 176; arrival in Austin, 1, 112, 127; attitudes toward the United States, 9J, 159, 163; Berlin circles, 18, 21—24, 25, 30, 36; death, 220; departure from Europe, 68, 7 0 - 7 5 , 8 1 - 8 5 ; interest in education, 164, 148— 50; and feminism, 176-78, 246n; and finances, 158; at Formosa, 127, 128-31, 152-53,

199? 2 2 1 ? 2.23—24; in Madeira, 36—40; marriage, 36—37; relationship with Edmund Montgomery, 9 - 1 1 , 35, 82, 86, 107, 220, 221; relationship with Lome Montgomery, 9 7 - 1 0 3 , 112, 122, 131-32, 137-38; monument proposals, 35, 166-68, 187; in Munich, 53-59, 7 1 - 7 4 ; Minister commission, 30—36; persona, 1— 4, 14, 23-24, 30, 7 4 - 7 5 , 1 5 0 52, 200—201, 217—18; Polytechnikum commissions, 54—57, 62, 72; pregnancies, 83, 85, 87; on portraiture, 58, 62; religious views, 65, 76; reviews of works, 20, 25, 34; Rousseau's influence on, 8 1 - 8 3 , 99; as secret agent for Garibaldi, 51; self-portrait, 2 0 0 201, 213; on the social function of art, 148—49, 179—80; and Texas, 89-90; her training and its influence, 6 - 1 1 , 13-15, 47, 50; trip to Egypt and Greece, 59— 62; trips to Europe, 160-63, 197, 201—5; in Thomasville, Georgia, 85-89; in the Tyrol, 5 0 - 5 1 ; World's Fair commissions, 127-42 —Works by: Albert Sidney Johnston Memorial, 187-91, 197, 200, 202—3, 204—5, 2°7> 2.08—11; Alexander von Humboldt, 21; Arthur Schopenhauer, 24-27, 30; Carrie Pease Graham, 183; D. T. Iglehart, 200; Eilhard Mitscherlisch, 30; Elisabet Ney, 200-201; Englebert van der Mark, 30, 34; Francis Lubbock, 157; Franz von Furstenberg, 30, 33-35; Friedrich Wohler, 54-56; George V (bust), 27, 201, 229n; George V (medallion), 163; Georg von Werthern, 58;

Giuseppi Garibaldi (bust), 45— 47, 57, 122, 202; Giuseppi Garibaldi (statuette), 47, 4 9 - 5 0 , 135, 202; Gustav Schleicher, 121-22, 23 8n; Helen Man Kirby, 200; Hermann Weiss, 20; Iris, 54; Jacob Grimm, 15—16, 18, 21, 27; Jesus Christ, 205, 206; Johanna Runge, 122; John Reagan, 147, 177; Joseph Joachim, 27; Joseph Sayers, 187, 206; Julius Runge, 122; Justus Liebig, 54, 56-57, 58; Justus Moser, 30, 32, 34; Karl Varnhagen von Ense, 21; Lady Macbeth, 210-17, 220, 223; Lawrence Sullivan Ross, 147; Lord Brownlow, 38—39; Lome Ney Montgomery (The Young Violinist), 100-101; LudwigH, 5 7 5 9 , 6 2 - 6 9 , 122, 137, 158, 161, 201, 207; Mercury, 54; Oran Roberts, 114-16, 157, 184; Otto von Bismarck, 51—52, 122, 127; Paula Ebers, 243n; Prometheus Bound, 75, 7 8 - 8 1 , 162; Saint Sebastian, 14-15, 30; Sam Houston (bust as old man), 24on; Sam Houston (bust as young man), 203, 24on; Sam Houston (statue), 126-27, 132-36, 1 3 9 41; Stephen F. Austin (statue), 126-27, I 3 2 5 I 375 138—41, Sursum (Genii of Mankind), 7 5 - 7 8 , 137, 161; W. P. Hardeman, 1 4 6 47, 157, 177; Walter von Plattenberg, 30, 31, 34; William Jennings Bryan, 184-86 Ney, Frederick, 4 Ney, Johann Adam, 4, 5 Ney, Michel, 2 Norton, Charles Eliot, 178 Novotny, Fritz, 12-13 Nutt, Conway, 92

Index

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Ochs, Friedrich, 137, 161 Onderdonk, Robert, 143, 149, 219 Palm, Swante, 184; Ney's bust of, 184 Paris Salon (1861), 30 Parker, Laura Bryan, 214, 224 Pease, Julia, 153-55, ^ i , J 8 3 - 8 4 , 224

Pease, Lucadia, 153-55, 183-84 Pennybacker, Anna J. H., 179, 214 Petri, Richard, 114 Pinson, Koppel S., 22 Prairie View University, 105-6 Preault, Antoine-Augustin, 13 Prometheus: Ney's comparison of Garibaldi to, 43, 64; as literary subject, 78—80; Ney's statue of, 75, 78—81, 162, 192, 212, 220

Rosenberg, Henry, 165 Rosenberg, William von, 124, 170— 7* Rosenberg Monument. See Monument to the Heroes of 1836 Ross, Lawrence Sullivan, Ney's bust of, 147 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 81-83, 84, 88, 90; as influence on Ney, 8 1 83, 99; Emile, 81—82 Rude, Francois, 13, 54 Runge, Johanna, Ney's bust of, 122 Runge, Julia. See Rose, Julia Runge Runge, Julius, 90, 96, 100, 102; and family, 93, 120; Ney's bust of, 122

Ruskin, John, 178 St. Louis World's Fair (1904), 201— 3,205,206-7,211

Rauch, Christian Daniel, 8, 11-14, 15, 18, 21, 24, 25, 76; memorial to Queen Louise, 11; monument to Frederick the Great, 11; monument to Wilhelm von Horn, 11 Reagan, John, 177, 197-9% Ney's bust of, 147, 177 Reaugh, Frank, 219 Reinli, Emma, 214 Rice, William Marsh, 177 Roberdeau, Mrs. J. D., 209-10 Roberts, Oran, 105, 114, 123, 126, 131, 135, 174, 177; and Texas capitol plans, 116-18; Ney's bust of, 114, 157, 184 Robertson, George Croom, 100, 101 Romanticism, 13, 15, 50, 54, 56, 62, 212, 220; British romantic poets, 62,80 Rosa, Ercole, bust of Garibaldi, 47, 48 Rose, Julia Runge, 97, 111, 112, 164

268

Sayers, Joseph, 186—89, 193—94, 196; Ney's bust of, 187, 206 Schadow, Gottfried, 12—13 Schadow, Wilhelm von, 7 Schiebe, Auguste, 62-63, 74 Schleicher, Gustav, 119; Ney's bust of, 120, 122, 23 8n; memorial to, 119—22

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 24-27, 29, 40; Ney's bust of, 24-27, 30 Schucking, Levin, 34 Schumann-Heink, Ernestine, 213 Schutze, Julius, 198 Schwabe, Mathilde, 24 3 n Schwanthaler, Ludwig, 8 Sculpture, nineteenth-century: in America, 207—8; on American frontier, 113—14; portraiture, 20—21; statuettes, 38; techniques of, 6-7, 56 Sebastian, Saint, 15; Ney's statue of, 14-15,30 Sergei, Johann Tobias, 12

Shipe, Monroe, 129 Simath, Crescentia (Cencie), 5 0 - 5 1 , 54, 70, 85, 94, 101, 102, n o ; Liendo duties, 93; burns NeyMontgomery correspondence, 107; last years, 222—23 Simon, Sir John, 72 State Council of Women (1894). See Texas Federation of Women's Clubs Steinbach, Sabina von, 5 Stephens, Ira K., 53, 71, 105 Steussy, Mattie Dupree, n o Stockhausen, Julius, 30 Stralendorff, Margaret Russell, 85, 86 Stralendorff, Baron Vicco von, 85— 87 Strasbourg Cathedral, 5 Swarthmore College, 101-2 Taft, Lorado, 203-4, 2 ° 8 Taylor, Bride Neill: as Ney biographer, 2—4; as member of Ney's circle, 153, 218-19, 224; Ney's portrait of, 3 Taylor, Thomas, 14—15 Teich, Frank, 169, 174, 175, 193 Terrell, Alexander W, 135 Texas: cultural life in, 113-14, 1 7 8 79, 23 6n; emigration to, 89 Texas capitol, n 6 - 1 8 , 2 3 7 ^ grounds, 144. See also Austin, Stephen F. (Ney statue); Houston, Sam (Ney statue) Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, 179-80; Ney's address to, 180 Texas Fine Arts Association, 224 Texas Magazine, 2 Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), 144, 145 Texas Woman's University, 165 Thomasville, Georgia, 85—89

Thorvaldsen, Albert Bertel, 8, 12, 13 Tips, Alma, 214 Tobin, Benedette, 126, 136, 141, 153, 181-84; Ney's bust of, 157 Tompkins, Daisy. See Montgomery, Daisy Tompkins Treitschke, Heinrich von, 11 Ueber Land und Meer, 1 Underwood, Sara, 176 United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), 144-45, 1 8 8 91, 208-10

Utopian ideas, 83-85, 220 Varnhagen, Rahel Lewin, 23-24, 228-29n Varnhagen von Ense, Karl, 18, 2 1 *4 Wagner, Cosima Liszt von Biilow, 30,64,72 Wagner, Richard, 53, 64, 66, 72, 23 2n

Walker, Mack, 84 Washington Post (1904 interview), 2, 23, 72, 73, 76, 80, 206 Weiss, Hermann, 20 Werner, Anton von, 161 Werthern, Georg von, 58, 6y; Ney's bust of, 5 8 White, Jessie, 44 Widnmann, Max, 8, 53 Williams, Margaret Houston, 132, 135, 181, 198, 224 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, n 13, 2 2 , 82

Women, as art patrons, 136, 1 7 7 81, 219. See also Daughters of the Republic of Texas; Texas Federation of Women's Clubs; Texas Fine Arts Association;

Index

269

Women (continued) United Daughters of the Confederacy Women artists, 4, 6—7, 29—30; sculptors, 6-7, 21, 50; training of, 6-7 Women in Germany, social conditions, 4, 22-23 Women's clubs, 179. See also Daughters of the Republic of Texas; Texas Federation of Women's Clubs; Texas Fine Arts Association; United Daughters of

270

the Confederacy Women's World's Fair Association of Texas, 123-27, 132, 135-37, 141—42, 147. See also Tobin, Benedette. Workingman's School (New York City), 108-9, 148 World's Columbian Exposition, 124, 144; and Texas building, 124— 26, 136-37, 147. See also Women's World's Fair Association of Texas Wortham, Louis, 201, 203, 211

Other titles in the Women in the West series: Martha Maxwell: Rocky Mountain Naturalist By Maxine Benson Emily: The Diary of a Hard-Worked Woman By Emily French Edited by Janet Lecompte A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians By Joan Mark