Frederick Elbridge Conway

Fred Conway was born August 24, 1900 in St. Louis. His father, a silk salesman, died when he was eleven years old. After graduating from Soldan High School in St. Louis, he worked briefly as a stock boy and a printmaker’s apprentice. At the printing firm, an artist suggested he take night classes with sculptor Robert Porter Bringhurst, at the corner of Grand and Olive Street.

Conway began his studies at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in 1916, studying with the Danish-American sculptor Victor Holm. After graduating, Conway travelled around France and northern Africa for two years, taking classes in Paris at the Academie Julian, the Academie Moderne, and the Academie Grande Chaumiere.

From 1924 to 1970, Conway was an esteemed member of the Washington University faculty. He retired with the rank of professor emeritus. Conway also taught at the Ste. Genevieve Summer School of Art beginning in 1935, and later at the University of Mississippi and the Creative Arts Workshop at the University of Wyoming. Outside the classroom, Conway gave regular lectures with the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, and was also involved with the Artists’ Equity Association, the St. Louis Art Directors Club, the St. Louis Art League, the St. Louis Society of Independent Artists, and the People’s Art Center. Students of Conway’s included the likes of Bernice Lee Boeschenstein, Artemesia Drefs, Dorothy Pflager, and Eda Lincoln Cushing. 

A prolific artist in oil, watercolor, acrylic, and stained glass, Conway was capable in portraiture, figure drawing, landscape painting, still life, and abstraction. He often portrayed scenes around his hometown of St. Louis: the Eads Bridge, the Old Courthouse, Union Station, City Hall, the lush golf courses of Forest Park. Locally, he created murals for the Brown Shoe Company, the Peabody Coal Company Headquarters downtown, and Barnes Hospital. In 1955, he was commissioned by Arthur B. Baer to create a mural for KETC Television in St Louis, entitled Education Through Television. Conway’s prismatic, three-panel stained glass windows can be found in the reading room of the Gaylord Music Library at Washington University.

Conway’s work was appreciated on the national stage as well. In 1939, his WPA mural for the United States Post Office in Purcell, Oklahoma, entitled The Roundup, was commissioned through the 48 State Mural Competition. He created another mural at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and in 1951, Conway won a national contest worth $25,000 from the Philbrook Art Center. His enormous, seventy foot long, 950 square foot prize-winning The Birth of Oklahoma – the largest commissioned mural at the time – was a dynamic, cubist-inspired work depicting the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. In 1955, Conway was awarded a $1000 grant from the National Council for United States Art, Inc. for sketches of a mural for a United Nations committee room. The General Services Administration commissioned another mural, The Movement of Time, for the Federal Office Building in Kansas City in 1968. 

During his lifetime, Conway participated in more than fifty exhibitions and received numerous prizes. He exhibited at the 48 States Competition in 1941; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1964, Philadelphia; the Herron Art Gallery, Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1955; the Joslyn Memorial Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, in 1949; Wildenstein Gallery, New York, 1949; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1952; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France, 1955; Bayonne Jewish Community Center, New York, 1955; National Academy of Design, New York, 1956: and Grand Central Moderns Gallery, New York, 1956.

Conway was involved in several artist organizations, including the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Two by Four Society of Art, Group 15, Artists' Equity Association, St. Louis Art Directors Club (1954), St. Louis Artists’ League, and St. Louis Society of Independent Artists.

His work can also be seen at the Joslyn Memorial Art Museum; the National Academy of Design; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia; and at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

A beloved teacher and tireless artist, Conway was remembered as “a gentle man with a rollicking cackle of a laugh” (_St. Louis Post-Dispatch, _August 6, 1973). “Unless you’re one of those rare ones who have been touched by the hand of God,” he once said, “you’ve just got to work like hell” (_St. Louis Post-Dispatch, _August 6, 1973). In 1973, Fred Conway died of cancer at the age of seventy-two. He was survived by his wife, Helen, and his three children.