Place Magazine - Fall 2024

8 PLACE Anderson suffered a mental breakdown in the late 1930s and in later years became increasingly reclusive, living apart from his wife and children, even as he continued producing art pieces and logbooks from his wideranging bicycle travels. Anderson’s creations included hundreds of watercolors, cast ceramics, block prints, and thousands of pen and ink drawings, most on paper not designed to last. Some estimate his art pieces total more than 20,000 in multiple mediums. His favorite subjects included pelicans and fairy tales. With the exception of exhibitions at the Born in New Orleans in 1903, Walter Anderson spent most of his life in or near Ocean Springs on the Mississippi coast. Anderson was classically trained at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked for a time as a designer in a family business, Shearwater Pottery. He married Agnes “Sissy” Grinstead, an art history graduate, experimented in a wide range of art forms – including block print storytelling (as in the Robinson book) – and produced a large mural on Ocean Springs history in a school auditorium. Walter Inglis Anderson c. 1951

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