Walter Inglis Anderson - Ocean Springs

Ocean Springs

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 ("Mac"), was a "Shearwater Pottery Annex" which produced inexpensive figurines, giving Anderson enough of an income to marry Agnes Grinstead in 1933, an art history graduate of Radcliffe College, who would later write a poignant memoir of their life together (Approaching the Magic Hour). During the early years, manufacturing of the figurines, which he called "widgets," prevented Anderson from painting and led to considerable tension.

In 1934, commissioned by a family friend, Ellsworth Woodward, Anderson painted an ambitious 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 Court House, were accepted by an illustrious committee then rejected by a Washington bureaucrat, causing Anderson considerable frustration. This disappointment, coupled with the death of his father in 1937, lingering bouts of both malaria and undulant fever, and the struggle to eke out a living with work he detested (manufacturing figurines) led to a mental breakdown, with psychotic episodes, in 1937.

From 1938 to 1940 Walter Anderson was in and out of mental hospitals, including the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sheppard Pratt, and the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield. At Phipps, where he spent 18 months, treated attentively by Adolf Meyer and a team of psychiatrists, he was diagnosed with severe depression ("hypothymergasia") with paranoid trends and schizophrenic ("parergasic") features. At Sheppard Pratt, the diagnosis was schizophrenia. Despite periods of psychosis and brief hospitalization in the 1950s, he led a life more productive than most, and a definitive diagnosis eluded physicians, although psychiatrist Paul Rodenhauser, who writes about Walter Anderson's creativity in relation to his mental illness, ventures a possible posthumous diagnosis: "schizo-affective disorder, bipolar type" (see "Alternative Reality and Art: The Creative World of Walter Inglis Anderson," available through Project Muse.) For others, recurring symptoms of malaria and undulant fever explain Anderson's depression and the apparent "fugue states" that occasionally accompanied it during this two-year period. Although lifelong mental illness has been suggested by some authors, others argue that there is no convincing evidence of mental problems either before or after the 1938-1940 period, and attribute psychotic episodes in the 1950s—for which he was, again, hospitalized—to the effects of alcoholism. Anderson was extremely productive and creative throughout his life. Even at Sheppard Pratt and later at Whitfield, he was well enough to draw, read, and plot elaborate escapes. After eloping from Sheppard Pratt, he walked 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Baltimore to Ocean Springs. During one of several escapes from the Mississippi State Hospital, he lowered himself on bedsheets from a second-story window, leaving the brick walls festooned with drawings of birds in flight, done in soap.