Walter Inglis Anderson

Walter Inglis Anderson (September 29, 1903-November 30, 1965) was an American painter.

Early life

He was born in New Orleans to George Walter Anderson and Annette McConnell Anderson. His father was a grain merchant and his mother was an artist.

He was the second of three brothers, the eldest being Peter and the youngest, Mac. He went to St. John's School in Manilus, New York, from the ages of eight to fourteen when his schooling was interrupted by World War I. After that he went to Manual Training School in New Orleans.

Art education

He then went on to the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (Parsons) in New York, and after a year there, devoted to the study of commercial art and to the theories of dynamic symmetry of Jay Hambidge, won a scholarship to study at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Here he would study under iconoclastic modernists like Henry McCarter and Arthur Carles, winning a Packard Award for his animal drawing and a Cresson Scholarship which allowed him to spend a Summer in France, where (he said) he was more impressed by the art of the caves and of the cathedrals than by the art he had seen in museums.

In Mississippi

Returning to Ocean Springs after his years at the Academy, Anderson worked as a designer in the family business, Shearwater Pottery, founded by his older brother Peter. In 1928-29 he designed his earliest ceramic pieces: pelican and crab bookends,lampstands, peculiar “Resting” and “Sitting Geometric Cats," a "Horse and Rider" and innumerable plates and vases. His work as a designer and decorator at Shearwater Pottery, from 1928 until his death included incised pieces, sgraffito work, underglaze decoration, woodcarvings of saints, and designs for furniture. Among his early projects, launched with his younger brother James McConnell Anderson, was a "Shearwater Pottery Annex" which produced inexpensive figurines, giving Anderson enough of an income to marry (1933) Agnes Grinstead Anderson. During the early years, this work prevented him from painting and led to considerable tension. In Spring 1934, he painted a mural in the auditorium of the Ocean Springs Public School (“Ocean Springs Past and Present”) as part of Public Works of Art Project. Paintings from this period include: "Indians Hunting," "Jockeys Riding Horses," four oil portraits of Sissy, 1933-37, "Black Skimmer," "Androcles and Lion," "Man on Horse," and Birth of Achilles (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art), along with watercolors of flowers, animals, and birds; studies for a projected book on birds of the southeastern U.S.; and linoleum blockprints, including “Tourist Cards”, “Alphabet,” nursery rhymes, “On the River,” “Valkyries,” “Butterfly Book,” and scenes from Shearwater Pottery. Designs for a second mural, in the Jackson, Mississippi Post Office and Court House, were rejected, causing Anderson considerable frustration. This defeat, coupled with the death of his father in 1937 a lingering attack of undulant fever, and the struggle to eke out a living at a task he detested (designing figurines) led to a mental breakdown in Spring 1937.

Institutionalization

For 3 or 4 years Walter Anderson suffered from severe depression and was in and out of mental hospitals. He was diagnosed by Norman Cameron at the Phipps Clinic as severly depressed after spending 18 months at that facility. Contrary to what some may have believed there was never any other reliable diagnosis. He spent his entire life without medication or supervision and lived a more productive life than most.

Post-institutionalization

He moved to Gautier, Mississippi, to live on his wife's father's estate, "Oldfields," with his family. He left his family to go live in a cottage on the Shearwater pottery compound, and his family moved nearby. He spent the next eighteen years traveling back and forth from Horn Island. During this time he made most of his existing art work. He painted pictures of everything in nature that he possibly could. He died in 1965. Among Anderson’s most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York (1942), New Orleans (1943), Texas (1945), China (1949), Costa Rica (1951) and Florida (1960); an account of his life among the pelican colonies of North Key, in the Chandeleurs; and about 90 journals of his trips to Horn Island, off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in which he combines close observation of the natural world with reflection on art and nature. Another noteworthy log describes a walking tour to a colony of sand hill cranes north of Gautier, Mississippi in January 1944. Less than one fourth of Anderson’s logbooks, and only a small part of his other writings, have been published.

  Between 1941 and 1947, as Anderson dreamed of finding “a common language of forms” for art

and of reestablishing “the relation of art to the people,” he found different ways to relate the written word to the graphic image. He produced over 9,000 pen and ink “realizations” or “visualizations” of classical works including Alice in Wonderland, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of Ossian, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Faust, The Voyage of the Beagle, Alice in Wonderland and Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne. He also produced large linoleum blocks of fairy tales and myth; wrote short stories for children, some with his own linoleum block or crayon illustrations (e.g., Robinson: The Pleasant History of an Unusual Cat or “The Golden Land”); and hundreds of pages of rhymed verse, some illustrated with line drawings. A dramatic poem on Christopher Columbus and a puppet play about the rhythms of life in the “cut-over lands” (where timber companies had clear-cut the first-growth pines of the coastal forests) testify to his love of theater. A series of love letters to his fiancée and wife Agnes Grinstead, written between 1930 and 1940, are notable for their passion and their reflections on his life as a struggling artist. Redding S. Sugg, Jr., editor of the Horn Island Logs, notes that Anderson had “a Blakean turn for aphorism.” His unpublished aphorisms, maxims and essays, written mostly between 1940 and 1965, cover a variety of subjects including nature, art history, politics, the mechanism of artistic creation, myth and fable, and reflections on other writers.

   Patti Carr Black points out that Anderson regarded his art not as a “product”
but as a “process, a means of experiencing the world.” 

Writing clearly played the same role.

“Why do I write this?” Anderson asks in one of the Horn Island logs. “I think writing has a cleansing effect,
and altho it is easy enough to keep the body clean,
the mind seems to grow clogged.” He seems to have regarded his writing,
like his painting, as kindling for what he called the “third poetry.”
“The first poetry is always written against 

the wind by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students,

wine drinkers who [have] learned to know a good thing.
The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written
by those who have brought nature and art together into one thing.”