Elisabet Ney Museum

Address 304 E 44th St

The Elisabet Ney Museum in the Hyde Park neighbourhood preserves the studio of Texas's most famous sculptor, built in 1892 and still containing her original tools, plaster casts, and finished marble works. Ney was a German sculptor of international reputation who ended up in Texas and spent the last decades of her life producing work here, including the official statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin in the US Capitol.

The studio building is remarkable in itself — a Romanesque Revival castle in the middle of an Austin residential neighbourhood — and the sculptures inside are genuinely impressive, particularly the large marble figures and life masks of Schopenhauer, Garibaldi, and other 19th-century luminaries Ney made earlier in her career. The museum is free on the first Sunday of the month.

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A story
Elisabet Ney arrived in Texas in 1872, one of Germany's most celebrated sculptors, and spent years on a Hempstead plantation before moving to Austin in 1892 and building this studio. She was legendarily eccentric: she never used her married name, wore men's clothing, kept her son's body in a casket in her studio for two years before burial, and refused nearly every social convention of Victorian Texas. Her sculptures nonetheless won official commissions, and she became a beloved Austin character.