Anna Airy
Artists
(1882 - 1964)
Airy had a studio in the village of Playford, Suffolk and was elected President of the Ipswich Art Society in 1945 which to this day has an Airy Prize for promising students.
Accepted into the Slade at just seventeen years old she studied under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer.
Winning numerous prizes and accolades Airy went on to exhibit at the Royal Academy in every year from 1905 to 1956.
In 1918 the Imperial War Museum commissioned Airy to paint four large canvases of munition factories which remain in their collection. She was almost certainly the first ever female war artist.
The subject painting ‘Young April’ was exhibited on six different occasions in the 1930’s and there is a sister work which is currently within the Ipswich + Colchester Museums collection.