Visions of Nature

The artistic legacy of Walter Anderson is universal and speaks deeply to a growing world-wide audience with each passing year. Rarely in the history of art has one individual left such a wealth of visual and written impressions of his life experience. From Anderson’s multifaceted legacy we are able to better understand the relationships and connections between the visual arts, natural science and literature. Truly, his works provide a nearly inexhaustible resource for teaching students of all ages about the magic of nature and the delicate balance of our needs as a species in relation to the ecosystem of Planet Earth. Through his poetic, poignant life journey we are allowed to gain a deeper understanding of our own visions of nature.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) greatly appreciates the creative collaboration with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (MMNS) as the venue to host the premiere of Visions of Nature: The World of Walter Anderson traveling exhibition in June 2001.

For her poetic insights and creative collaboration, I offer my heartfelt thanks to Paticia Pinson, my partner in co-curating the exhibition. Also, much appreciation goes to the Family of Walter Anderson for their unerring support and to Donald Bradburn for lending his rich photography to the exhibition.

Clayton Bass, Executive Director

Walter Anderson (1903-1965) is best known for his watercolors of the flora and fauna of Mississippi and its barrier islands. Son of a prominent New Orleans grain merchant father and Newcomb-trained artist and activist mother, he received his training at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Due to the excellence of his work, he received the Cresson Award which provided a year’s study in France. Returning to Ocean Springs in 1929 after his study abroad, he began working with his brother, Peter, who had opened Shearwater Pottery the year before. Joined by their younger brother, Mac, the three Anderson brothers are now internationally recognized for their extraordinary art pottery. During the years 1929-1939, now recognized as his “Ocean Springs Period,” Walter Anderson also produced many works in various media including oil paintings, drawings, furniture, textiles and murals.

Anderson’s first encounter with a more bucolic life was during 1940-1947 when he moved to Oldfields, the plantation home of his father-in-law in Gautier, near Ocean Springs. The “Oldfields Period” is filled with images of life on a farm as well as images from the literary works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer. These years changed the focus of his work, however, to the riches of the natural world that captured his imagination for the rest of his life.

The “Horn Island Period” stretches from 1948 until his death in 1965 and includes Anderson’s most mature work. During these years Anderson spent most of his time among the sand dunes, pine forests and lagoons of this twelve-mile long barrier island, which lies eight miles at the nearest point from the mainland. Surrounded by “an embarrassment of riches”, the island’s flora and fauna are the subjects of many of the works in Visions of Nature: The World of Walter Anderson. It was during the Horn Island Period that Walter Anderson completed his personal transformation from an observer of nature, to that of a true participant.

This exhibition takes the viewer on a journey not unlike the ones that Walter Anderson made. Not only did he love stories of epic and voyage, he traveled to China, Central America, by his own boat on the Mississippi River to Pennsylvania, to the “terra incognita” of the mind and inner self, and finally, to his favorite destination, Horn Island. “So much depends on the dominant mode on shore,” he said, “that it was necessary for me to go to sea to find the conditional.”

He described himself as “the artist who prefers nature to art” and sought to merge himself with nature in order to truly “realize” or understand it.

“I made a drawing of the bittern’s nest while the flies stung; later a watercolor under my boat while the rain poured. Such is the life of an artist who prefers nature to art. He really should cultivate art more but feels that his love of art will take care of itself if it has things to feed upon.”

In over 90 journals from this period, there are accounts of different species of birds and animals, his personal philosophy, poetry, aphorisms, and accounts of wind and waves and clouds. He became a spokesman for the natural world compelling the viewer to stop, to see it and become one with it.

“The bird flies and in that fraction of a fraction of a second, man and bird are real. He is not only king, he is man. And he is not only man, he is the only man and that is the only bird and every feather, every mark, every part of the pattern of its feathers is real, and he, man, exists and he is almost as wonderful as the thing he sees.”

Through his artistic legacy, Walter Anderson has become recognized as one of the great cultural treasures of Mississippi along with William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and many others. It is my hope that Visions of Nature will bring Mississippians a new sense of pride in this legacy, and introduce Anderson’s work far beyond the borders of the South. Truly his “vision of nature” redefines and enhances the interrelationship between humankind and the larger natural world that we inhabit.

Patricia Pinson, Curator

Rowing at Night by Walter Inglis Anderson	Owl by Walter Inglis Anderson
Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) Image courtesy Mississippi Museum of Natural Science	Lagoon and Slash Pines, photograph by Donald Bradburn