Acheson, Anne Crawford

Acheson, Anne Crawford (1882–1962), sculptor, was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, one of several daughters of John Acheson and Harriet Glasgow Acheson, and was educated in Victoria College and later in the School of Art (both in Belfast) and then at the Royal College of Art, London, from which she received a diploma in sculpture (1911). She also had a degree in modern literature from the RUI. Throughout her career she exhibited pieces in wood, and later in stone, concrete, and metal, at the Royal Academy, London, and in the Paris Salons of 1914 and 1922. She also painted in watercolours, and was secretary of the Society of Women Artists. She was best known for sculptures of children in lead, often intended for use as garden ornaments. Her work was represented in a garden at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. In 1930 she became an academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts, and showed her work in an exhibition of Irish art in Brussels. She was the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors (1938), was an Associate of the Royal College of Art, and was made CBE in 1919 in recognition of her war work at the Surgical Requisites Association in London, where she developed surgical aids. An ‘Architectural screen’ in bronze is one of her best-known pieces, and she won the Gleichen award (1938) for a sculpture entitled ‘Thief’. She lived with her sisters in Glebe House, Glenavy, Co. Antrim, from 1951 till her death, unmarried, on 13 March 1962.