Anna Airy was a British oil painter, pastel artist and etcher. She 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.
Airy was born in Greenwich, London, daughter of engineer Wilfrid Airy and Anna née Listing, and granddaughter of Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1899 to 1903, where she studied with William Orpen and Augustus John, Fred Brown, Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer.
Airy won all the prizes at the Slade School for portrait, figure, and other subjects including the Slade School Scholarship in 1902. She also won the Melville Nettleship Prize in 1900, 1901 and 1902. Airy was given commissions in a number of factories and painted her canvases on site during World War I, in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. For example, while working at great speed to paint A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London in an extremely hot environment, "the ground became so hot that her shoes were burnt off her feet". This painting was featured in an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum's 2011-2012 exhibition Women War Artists.
In June 1918 the Munitions Committee of the Imperial War Museum commissioned her to create four paintings representing typical scenes in four munitions factories: National Projectile Factory at Hackney; National Filling Factory at Chilwell, Nottingham, W G Armstrong Whitworth's at Nottingham; Aircraft Manufacturing Co. at Hendon; South Metropolitan Gas Co.
She was also commissioned by the Women's Work Section. In 1917 she was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund; and in 1940 by the Ministry of Munitions. Her etching Forerunners of Fruit (c.1925) is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
