Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is a statue of the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth by German American sculptor Elisabet Ney. The sculpture is a life-size full-length female figure rendered in marble. Completed in 1905, Lady Macbeth is one of Ney's last works and was regarded by the artist as her masterpiece. It is housed in Washington, D.C., in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which acquired the piece in 1998. History Ney began sculpting Lady Macbeth in 1903, shortly after she completed the design of her memorial statue of Albert Sidney Johnston. Unlike Ney's other major contemporary works, the statue was not made in response to any commission or for any particular buyer. She developed the piece in her studio in Austin, Texas, Formosa (now the Elisabet Ney Museum), where the plaster model is still on display. The piece was cut in marble in Italy beginning in 1903, alongside second copies of Ney's portraits of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin for submission to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Lady Macbeth was completed in 1905, two years before Ney's death; it proved to be her last major work. Design and interpretation The sculpture interprets the sleepwalking scene in act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is depicted sleepwalking barefoot in a flowing nightgown, her eyes half closed, with her left arm reaching across her body to clutch her right hand. Her face is uplifted and turned away from her clenched hands; her facial expression is pained, and her body is twisted by the pose of the head and arms.