Albert Sidney Johnston

Albert Sidney Johnston is a memorial statue of General Albert Sidney Johnston by German American sculptor Elisabet Ney. The piece is a life-size recumbent male figure rendered in marble sculpture. It depicts the General at the time of his death in the Battle of Shiloh during the American Civil War. Completed in 1903, the piece resides atop Johnston's tomb in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, Texas, where it was installed in 1905. History After his death in 1862, Albert Sidney Johnston was first buried in New Orleans; once the Civil War had ended, the Texas Legislature had his body reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery in 1867. In 1901, the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy brought a bill before the state legislature that appropriated $10,000 for a memorial to be placed over Johnston's grave. Governor Joseph D. Sayers gave the commission to Austin, Texas, sculptor Elisabet Ney, whose statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston had recently been approved for installation in the Texas State Capitol. Ney developed the work between 1902 and 1903 in her Austin studio, Formosa (now the Elisabet Ney Museum), where the plaster model is still on display. The final marble version was cut in 1904 in Seravezza, Italy, together with copies of Ney's statues of Austin and Houston intended for the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C. After being shipped to the United States, Johnston was displayed in the Texas building at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where it won a bronze medal. It was then permanently installed at Johnston's tomb in Austin in 1905. Design and interpretation