Sybil Andrews was born on 19 April 1899 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. ‘We had a paint-box from the cradle’, she would later recall, ‘not with the idea of being wonderful artists, but as a way of keeping us quiet and amused.’ She remembered her first proper paint-box with china containers for the watercolour and going to the local school of art and drawing from the plaster casts. During the Great War, she worked on aircraft construction in Coventry, later moving to Bristol where, as an oxy-acetylene torch welder, she worked on the construction of the first metal aeroplanes at the Bristol Welding Company In her spare time, she studied art, taking John Hassall’s home correspondence course. At the end of 1920, she had a joint exhibition of watercolours and pastels with Cyril Power at Crescent House, Bury St Edmunds. In 1922 she moved to London and attended the Heatherley School of Art, where she studied under Henry G Massey and did ‘two years’ study in one’. In that period, she is also known to have studied privately with the Polish sculptor Henri Glicenstein, who taught her to draw from life and introduced her to drypoint etching. In 1925, she joined Iain MacNab’s newly-founded Grosvenor School of Modern Art as their secretary. In 1926 at school, Andrews and Power met Claude Flight, who taught them how to cut and print from linoleum blocks. From 1930 to July 1938, Andrews and Power shared a studio at 2 Brook Green in Hammersmith and developed a common aesthetic in their work. That informal working partnership produced some of the finest British prints of the 1930s. Andrews’ themes were of the dynamism of the modern machine age and the movement of the human figure at work or sport, usually executed using only four linoleum blocks. Her linocuts are considered by some to have surpassed her teacher Flight.  Racing is one of Sybil Andrews’s most sought-after linocuts. It was the embodiment of the dynamism of horse racing and speed that fascinated the Grosvenor School. A copy is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Andrews exhibited regularly between 1928 and 1937 at the Redfern and Ward Galleries. She shared a one-man show with Cyril Power in January 1933 at the Redfern Gallery. After the last Redfern show Andrews moved, in 1938, to the New Forest. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Andrews worked in boatbuilding, working in the yard of the British Power Boat Company at Hythe, near Southampton. Even that experience was turned to artistic account: ‘To me it was a wonderful experience. We were given training and then set to work into the yards and on the boats side by side with the men. I asked if I could be given permission to make notes of the boats being built for me to work on after the war, and to my astonishment, I was given authority to make sketches.’ After the war, Andrews used the sketches for a series of seven canvases now in the RAF Museum, Hendon. In the shipyard, Andrews met Walter Morgan; they married in 1947 and migrated to British Columbia, Canada. In true pioneer style, they settled in a remote stretch of the Campbell River and built their own wooden house. For the next half-century, Andrews painted and taught. She endeavoured to bring out the individual way of seeing of each of her pupils: ‘My teaching grew just as a plant or tree grows, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and a tree takes a lifetime in its growing.’ Andrews was elected to the Society of Canadian Painters, Etchers and Engravers in 1951. In 1975 she completed one of her major works, The Banner of St Edmund. Hand-embroidered in silks on linen, and first conceived, designed in 1930, it now hangs in the Treasury of St James Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds. She exhibited at the Vancouver and Victoria Art Galleries and had work purchased by Canadian public galleries as well as by the British Museum, the V & A and the Los Angeles Museum. She featured in the exhibition of ‘Claude Flight and his Circle’ held at the Parkin Gallery in London in 1975 and in another in 1978, which toured Italy under the title ‘Futuristi Inglesi’. In 1982-83 Canada gave her a major retrospective that toured the country, organised by the Glenbow Museum. Andrews made generous gifts of her work to Canada, Australia, the British Museum and the Clock House Museum, Bury St Edmunds. She was still teaching, right up until her death on 21 December 1992. More than a thousand of her works may be found in the Glenbow Museum at Alberta in Canada. Andrews’ Michaelmas may be seen above.