Sam Houston Statue by Elisabet Ney

The State of Texas commissioned a statue of Sam Houston in 1892 for display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This plaster cast was completed in 1893 and displayed to great acclaim at the Exposition.

Elisabet Ney (1833–1907) was a German sculptor born in Münster, Westphalia. She was the first woman admitted to Munich's Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpture. When the Franco-Prussian war started in 1870, she and her family left for the United States, eventually settling in Waller County, Texas, in 1872. She came to Austin in 1892 and built her studio in Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood. The studio and the grounds are now part of the Elisabet Ney Museum.

Ney was meticulous in her research. She borrowed family photographs of Houston to help capture his personality and a saber belonging to Houston to ensure her design was as accurate as possible. She chose to portray Houston as a man in his forties during the Texas Revolution. Ney made this full-scale plaster cast from the original clay model in 1893. A marble version of the sculpture stands in the Texas Capitol, a second marble sculpture resides in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol.