One of four paintings of World War l munitions factories by Anna Airy (1882 -1964) , commissioned by the Imperial War Museum Committee . It shows the Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, staffed by women under one foreman, machining 15 inch shells . A painting of munitions girls leaving work was lost and believed destroyed . In 1917 she was commissioned to do a picture for the Canadian War Memorial Commission.
Another of Airey's pictures, commissioned by the Women's Work Committee, captured women working in a hellish London gas retort house in 1920. A less grim watercolour by the artist , entitled The rosy-cheeked ones , is in the NSW Art Gallery and a vegetable garden is the subject of one in a New Zealand gallery . 
Recently obtained in Townsville, North Queensland, was the Christie's supported 1985 catalogue for the Ipswich Art Club's Airy retrospective .
At the age of 17 , Airey entered the Slade School in London in 1899, exhibited in the Royal Academy ,was a member of the Royal Institute of Portrait Painters , published books on the art of pastel, making a start in art and London Lyrics.
Her mother, the daughter of a professor , died in childbirth. Anna's father, Wilfred Airy , Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, later the Astronomer Royal , backed her to the hilt in her ambition to become an artist .
