Anna Airy was an English oil painter, pastel artist and etcher.
20 Facts About Anna Airy
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Anna Airy was one of the first women officially commissioned as a war artist and was recognised as one of the leading women artists of her generation.
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Anna Airy was born on 6 June 1882 in Greenwich, London, the daughter of Anna and Wilfrid Airy, an engineer who worked on Orwell Park Observatory.
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Airy's German mother died a fortnight after her birth and baby Anna was raised by two of her paternal aunts, Christabel and Annot Airy.
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Anna Airy's aunts were both artists and encouraged her interest, as did her father who Airy later remembered promising "if I persisted in going in for art when I left school that he would give me the finest art education either in this country or on the Continent that could be had at that time, after which I must stand on my own two feet".
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Anna Airy won prizes at the Slade School for portrait, figure, and other subjects including the Slade School Scholarship in 1902.
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Anna Airy won the Melville Nettleship Prize in 1900,1901 and 1902.
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Anna Airy claimed to have been in one such establishment when a murder took place, only escaping being questioned by the police by the help of a cardsharp friend.
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Anna Airy was commissioned by the Women's Work Section of the IWM during the war.
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Anna Airy's work was part of the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics and the 1932 Summer Olympics.
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Anna Airy was married to the artist Geoffrey Buckingham Pocock and for many years the couple lived at Haverstock Hill in Hampstead before moving to Playford near Ipswich to the house left to her by her father Wilfrid in 1925.
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Anna Airy worked as a teacher at Ipswich Art School.
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Anna Airy's work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905 and in each subsequent year there until 1956.
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Anna Airy exhibited at the Paris Salon and in Italy, Canada and in the United States.
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Anna Airy has been represented in the British Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Imperial War Museum.
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Anna Airy's work appeared in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney as well as in Auckland, New Zealand; Vancouver and Ottawa in Canada; and in the Corporation Art Galleries of Liverpool, Leeds, Huddersfield, Birkenhead, Blackpool, Rochdale, Ipswich, Doncaster, Lincoln, Harrogate, Paisley and Newport and North Lanarkshire.
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Anna Airy was elected as a member of The Pastel Society in 1906.
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Anna Airy joined the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers in 1908 when the society elected her.
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Anna Airy was an elected member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and Member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.
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Anna Airy was elected as the President of the Ipswich Art Society in 1945 and had significant impact in the role which she held until her death in 1964.