William Martin Conway

Artist Info

William Martin ConwayRochester, Kent, 1856 - 1937, London

Conway, (William) Martin, Baron Conway of Allington (1856–1937), art historian and mountaineer, was born on 12 April 1856 at Rochester, Kent, the only son of William Conway, a low-church evangelical vicar of St Nicholas's Church, Rochester, afterwards rector of St Margaret's Church, Westminster, and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Adam Martin MD of Rochester. He had two sisters. Martin Conway was educated at Repton School and from 1875 at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history, graduating BA in 1879 and MA in 1882. He was a Cambridge University extension lecturer from 1882 to 1885. Conway climbed extensively in the Alps as an undergraduate, and was elected to the Alpine Club in 1877. In 1881 he published the Zermatt Pocketbook, the model for a series of Conway and Coolidge's Climbers' Guides, edited with W. A. B. Coolidge. Conway was responsible for many beautiful mountain names, such as Wellenkuppe, Windjoch, and Dent du Requin.

Another of Conway's interests was woodcuts and early printed books. This was encouraged by the university librarian, Henry Bradshaw, who financed the journeys on which Conway collected the material for Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century (1884), the most learned of his thirty books. While touring art galleries in Italy in 1883, Conway met Katrina, the only child of Charles Lambard, of Augusta, Maine, builder of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and stepdaughter of Manton Marble, an investor and former editor and owner of the New York World. Conway was already engaged to Rose Shakespear, but he broke this engagement, ostensibly on religious grounds, and married Katrina at Marble's home, 532 Fifth Avenue, New York, on 10 June 1884. Supported by Katrina's family, the couple moved to Park Street, London, where their only child, Agnes, was born on 2 May 1885.

Conway became Roscoe professor of art at University College, Liverpool, in 1885. He published books on Reynolds, Gainsborough, early Flemish artists, and Albrecht Dürer, and organized congresses in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Birmingham on the relationship between art and industry. Conway resigned from his Liverpool position in 1888 and moved to London, where he frequented the Savile Club, gave lectures, and published a book on the art of the ancient world, which was the result of nine months' travel with his family in the Near East. Conway and his wife bought paintings as her income increased, and Conway later recounted his experiences in this area in The Sport of Collecting (1914).

In 1892 Conway led a large-scale mountaineering expedition to the Karakoram Himalayas with the financial support of scientific societies and his father-in-law, Manton Marble. Marble was not sure about Conway's motives: ‘Tis not quite relevant to your art-career to be climbing mountains, but I perceive that Alpine, Caucasian, or Himalayan supereminence may be the corner-stone of artistic eminence’ (Evans, 134). Conway's large party surveyed the Baltoro glacier and the region around K2, and ascended Pioneer Peak on Baltoro Kangri, which at 6890 metres may have constituted an altitude record at the time.

Conway returned to acclaim in England, but he did not rest on his laurels. After publishing a book about the Karakoram in 1894, he walked the length of the Alps with two Gurkha soldiers in a gruelling publicity stunt that formed the basis of a popular book, The Alps from End to End (1895). He received a knighthood in 1895 and shortly afterwards made an unsuccessful bid to win a seat in parliament as a Liberal. In 1896 Conway surveyed in Spitsbergen, an island in the Arctic circle about which he wrote several books. According to Arnold Lunn, Conway's experiments with skis while crossing Spitsbergen made him one of the pioneers of British skiing. In 1898 Conway travelled south to climb Illimani in Bolivia and Aconcagua in Argentina with two alpine guides. Before leaving Bolivia, Conway accepted an unsolicited offer from the Bolivian president of a mining concession for the Acre territory, a vast region at the headwaters of the Amazon. In 1902 Conway sold his original South American syndicate at a profit of $20,000, although he remained a director of other ventures and, for the next thirty years, actively invested in South American rubber, railroad, and gold companies.

Conway also enjoyed the non-pecuniary rewards of his fame. Marble's prediction that Conway's climbing would add to his reputation as an art historian was ultimately vindicated. In 1901 he was offered a term as the Slade professor of fine arts at Cambridge. He resumed writing art history, including works on Tuscan art, the great masters, the Van Eycks, and Giorgione. After he resigned the Slade professorship in 1904, he and his wife bought and restored Allington Castle, near Maidstone. He served as president of the Alpine Club from 1902 to 1904 and was first president of the Alpine Ski Club in 1908. He was awarded the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1905. As a celebrity, Conway later received free passes to Swiss resorts in winter and summer from Henry Lunn and other travel agents and hoteliers.

The First World War rekindled Conway's interest in politics. His conservative political views were expressed in The Crowd in Peace and War (1915), which he considered his best book. In 1917 Conway was appointed director-general of the Imperial War Museum, an honorary post which he retained until his death. In 1917–18 he toured the Western Front for the museum; his daughter, Agnes, played a central role in collecting material on women's war work. Conway was almost non-partisan in his politics. On 14 August 1918 he asked the Conservative central office for a constituency; the next day he asked the Liberal whip for their nomination. He was later nominated and duly elected as a Unionist, representing the combined English universities from 1918 to 1931, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Conway of Allington. He received an honorary LittD from both Durham and Manchester in 1919. After the war he undertook two important journeys, one to Morocco and Palestine and the other to Soviet Russia, researching material for lectures on Zionism which he gave in Britain and the United States. These two journeys formed the basis of two further books: Palestine and Morocco: Lands of the Overlap (1923) and Art Treasures in Soviet Russia (1925). The first allowed him to compare the effects of French and British rule, while for the second he was granted access to the art collections confiscated by the Bolsheviks.

Conway served as a trustee of the Wallace Collection and the National Portrait Gallery and was active in the Society of Authors and the Society of Antiquaries. He was one of the first to realize the value of the systematic and comprehensive collection of photographic records of architecture and art and he presented his own collection of 100,000 photographs to the Courtauld Institute of Art. In later years he published several autobiographical works: Mountain Memories (1920), Episodes of a Varied Life (1932), and A Pilgrim's Quest for the Divine (1936). Satirical cartoons emphasized his bushy eyebrows, wire glasses, plump jowls, and pug nose. A portrait executed in 1934 by Augustus John shows him with long, flowing white hair.

In 1924 Conway began a love affair with Mrs Monica Hadow, a divorcee forty-four years his junior with whom he worked, but this ended when she remarried in 1930. When his wife, Katrina, died on 22 November 1933, she left her estate, including Allington Castle, to their daughter, although Conway continued to live there and at Westminster. On 17 November 1934, he married Iva, daughter of Daniel Christian and widow of Reginald Lawson, of Saltwood Castle, Kent. He died at the Empire Nursing Home, Vincent Square, London, on 19 April 1937, and a memorial service was held on 23 April at St Margaret's, Westminster.

Peter H. Hansen

Sources

J. Evans, The Conways: a history of three generations (1966) · CUL, Conway MSS · A. L. Mumm, The Alpine Club register, 3 (1928), 74–83 · C. W. and others, ‘In memoriam: Lord Conway of Allington, 1856–1937’, Alpine Journal, 49 (1937), 248–59 · The Times (20 April 1937) · P. H. Hansen, ‘British mountaineering, 1850–1914’, PhD diss., Harvard U., 1991 · P. Stansky, ‘Art, industry, and the aspirations of William Martin Conway’, Victorian Studies, 19 (1975–6), 465–84 · Venn, Alum. Cant. · W. W. Rouse Ball and J. A. Venn, eds., Admissions to Trinity College, Cambridge, 5 (1913), 508 · P. H. Hansen, ‘Vertical boundaries, national identities: British mountaineering on the frontiers of Europe and the empire, 1868–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24 (1996), 48–71