Anthea Craigmyle: Molly Typing, 1940
Anthea Craigmyle’s father was the Vicar at St Nicholas’ Church on Chiswick Mall. Taught at school by Henry Moore’s wife Irina, and at Chelsea School of Art by Ceri Richardson and Julian Trevelyan, a close neighbour, she later travelled to India and, on her return, married Donald (Lord) Craigmyle. After the death of her husband in 1998, Anthea moved back from Hampstead to her original home ground, where she lived a few hundred yards closer to Hammersmith in ‘the last house in Chiswick’ along the river.
A regular highlight of the Artists at Home circuit, Anthea’s paintings deal with domestic life, allotments, walks in Chiswick House gardens, churchyards, nature, people, boats, and landscapes.
This painting formed the frontispiece of A Vicarage in the Blitz,* a collection of letters between Anthea’s mother, Molly Rich, and a young Austrian refugee, Otto, who stayed with the family at the Vicarage on Chiswick Mall in 1939. Published in 2013 and illustrated by Craigmyle, it shows Molly sitting typing; behind her the barrage balloons fly over Fuller’s Brewery.
Anthea Craigmyle died in 2016.
Acknowledgement: With thanks to the Estate of Anthea Craigmyle.
* A Vicarage in the Blitz: The Wartime Letters of Molly Rich 1940–1944 with illustrations by Anthea Craigmyle, 2013
