After his death in 1862, 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, 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
The statue depicts Johnston lying on a stretcher at the time of his death during the Battle of Shiloh. The figure is recumbent, dressed in the formal military uniform of a Confederate General. Johnston's eyes are closed, and his left arm is folded across his chest, while his right lies alongside him. The statue's legs are draped in a Confederate"Southern cross" battle flag, which hangs from a broken staff. The statue is protected from the elements by a plexiglas dome, which is then surrounded by a cream-colored wrought-iron enclosure with Gothic revival decorative elements. In designing Johnston, Ney aimed for a realistic effect, emphasizing naturalistic details in her composition. The sculpture includes the rough wooden litter and folded cloths on which the dying Johnston is meant to have been carried from the battle. During the work's development, representatives of the Daughters of the Confederacy pressed Ney to include more symbolic or allegorical elements, but Ney refused, insisting upon a scene which could in fact have occurred on the Shiloh battlefield. She did, however, intend the broken flagstaff to poetically suggest that the Confederacy's hopes of victory had been destroyed by Johnston's death. Ney designed the statue's enclosure with open ironwork bars and railings so that the tomb and statue would be visible from all sides without visitors having to enter the mausoleum. She included Gothic elements to give the site a solemn and religious quality. Ney also incorporated Texas lone stars into the Gothic tracery to mark Johnston's grave as a commemoration of a notable Texan.
