Walter Anderson and the Wild Coast at Ocean Springs
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Walter Inglis Anderson spent a significant part of his adult life paddling alone to Horn Island in a small rowboat and living there for days or weeks at a time, painting the wildlife of the Mississippi Sound with a ferocity that bordered on compulsion. He was one of the most original American artists of the twentieth century, largely unknown during his lifetime and discovered by the wider art world after his death.
Anderson was born in New Orleans in nineteen oh three and spent most of his working life in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where his family had deep roots. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and spent time in Europe, but the landscape and wildlife of the Mississippi Gulf Coast was the subject that consumed him. He worked in watercolor, oil, and an unusual personal medium of ceramic murals and linoleum block prints. He decorated the walls of his cottage with murals so densely layered that visitors who saw them after his death in nineteen sixty-five described them as a room that had been turned inside out into a forest.
Anderson was also, in the clinical vocabulary of his era, mentally ill. He spent time in a state institution. He left his family for extended periods without notice. His relationship to ordinary daily life was intermittent. On Horn Island he found something that the mainland could not give him: an environment with no human social demands, where the birds and marsh grasses and Gulf light operated on their own schedule and invited nothing from him but attention.
The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs opened in nineteen ninety-one and houses a major public collection of his work. The community center he decorated with his murals, the Shearwater Pottery complex his family operates, and the cottage walls he painted are also part of the Anderson patrimony in Ocean Springs. His notebooks from the Horn Island years, illustrated with hundreds of sketches, were published after his death and have become the clearest window into how he saw.
