Monday, 16 September 2013

Drawings for Anne Naylor





Anne Naylor was a 13-year old orphan who was beaten to death by her milliner employer in London in 1758. Anne's boss, Sarah Metyard, along with Metyard's daughter Sally, repeatedly tortured Anne who was a sick child and poor worker. Eventually Anne passed away, however, the Metyards kept up the pretense that she was still alive, so not to scare the other girls, whilst keeping her body in a trunk. The smell of the corpse became too much to bear, so the Metyards chopped up Anne's body and disposed of it in a drain in Farringdon on Christmas Day in 1758. Ten years later, unable to keep their secret, the Metyards were found out; they were hung at Tyburn. Anne's ghost, the "Screaming Spectre of Farringdon", supposedly still haunts the train station of the same name. These are the drawings that I'm working on for a silk about Anne, or "Nanny" as she was known.