“Keep Austin Weird!” so goes the slogan. I’m not sure what it means. But I do know there have been more than a few unusual people who called Austin home and made the city a richer place. The German sculptor Elisabet Ney would not have called herself “weird” or even “seltsam”. She was a talented artist already and famous in Europe when she immigrated to Texas in the 1870s. Elisabet made her living in an area of the fine arts hardly welcoming to women: sculpting famous people. Austin was a small town then, with a burned down capitol building and no UT.
Elisabet must have been hard to miss. She was married to a Scottish doctor, but kept her own name and the two lived separately most of the time. When she was not working on her art, she liked to build furniture from scratch and camp out in a tent in her front yard. A woman I could really fall for. Elisabet hated housework, loved living in the country and didn’t bother with Victorian-era fashions and mores. Where she and her husband got their money, nobody knew.
When the legislature approved funds to build a new capitol in the 1880s, Elisabet won a commission to sculpt statues of famous Texans to decorate the halls. Hiring a local artist for the job was one of the wiser decisions our state government has made. Nobody really remembered what Stephen Austin looked like. Elisabet sculpted him in a buckskin outfit with a firearm and leading man good looks, just like Texans wanted. To do it right, Elisabet built herself an impressive limestone studio on the banks of Waller Creek north of town, with high ceilings, good light and a room upstairs for her husband when he visited from out of town. She named the place “Formosa” which means “beautiful” in Portuguese.
It’s a wonder anyone so unconventional was allowed to live in Texas then without being run off. But this was Austin. Elisabet worked there at her studio into her ‘70s, feeding her chickens, hammering away on imported marble blocks and fashioning busts out of clay that she scooped out of the riverbank. When the weather permitted, she slept outdoors on the balcony. She died there in her studio in 1907. Today, you can find Elisabet Ney’s work in capitols and museums around the world. There are quite a few pieces at her studio, which is still there right off 45th Street, just as she must have left it, filled with light, and marble dust and plaster.
Formosa is an unusual place, with a basement and crenelated tower; things you don’t find in Austin homes. It looks like it was built by three different builders, tacking on additions as the need arose. The City preserved Formosa as a museum and it only recently reopened after being closed far too long. You should go there.
I set up there on the grounds to paint next to the creek one June morning before the sun got too high. The north side of the studio has two enormous windows designed to open to accommodate Elisabet’s larger sculptures. The sun moved quicker than my brush. I could hear children playing at the Shipe Park pool and somebody’s rooster in Hyde Park let the world know he was on the job. They don’t cut the grass there but that’s no doubt on purpose. Wildflowers popped up here and there and a tiny spider walked across my wet panel just as I was finishing. For this painting, I used six colors and three brushes.
Check out my other Austin paintings.
Here’s my version of Formosa: 
