About this tour
Elisabet Ney was already a celebrated sculptor in Europe — she had modeled kings and philosophers — when she and her husband settled in Texas, and in 1892 she built a limestone studio in Austin's Hyde Park that she named Formosa. From that castle-like workshop she carved the marble statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin that still stand in the Capitol, becoming the artist who gave Texas its founders in stone. This drive links her studio-turned-museum, the Capitol where her masterworks live, the city's flagship art collection that frames her era, and the sculpture garden of Charles Umlauf, the Austin artist who carried her tradition into the twentieth century.