Agnes Grinstead Anderson
Major Works
- Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
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Agnes Grinstead Anderson: A Biography
Agnes
Grinstead Anderson, wife of the artist Walter Anderson, was born in
Gautier, Mississippi, formerly know as West Pascagoula, in
1909. She spent much of her childhood in the house where she was
born, known as  Oldfields
Plantation. Her father was an attorney. Her sister Paticia
married Peter Anderson, and Agnes herself married Walter Anderson
in 1933. The sisters moved to Ocean Springs, the home of the
Anderson brothers, after their marriages, but Agnes and
Walter returned to Oldfields from 1941 to 1946. Those years
proved difficult for the Andersons. In her memoir and in a book
by Christopher Maurer called Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi, those years are described. Agnes published her memoir Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
in 1989. She also wrote a memoir of her childhood at Oldfields
which has not yet been published. In addition, she was a poet,
nature writer, and journal keeper. Walter Anderson died in 1965,
and Agnes died in 1991. The letters she wrote to Walter Anderson before
their marriage are currently being edited for publication.
 Walter
Anderson's most famous and most controversial work is, without a doubt,
his little room in the cabin. Many people have many different
opinions as to what it represents and why it was painted. There
is even more speculation over what the woman figure on the chimney is,
or whether or not he finished it. Walter Anderson's family
believes that the woman is the Mississippi river, and the mural a
tribute to God. Others think that the entire mural is a depiction
of Psalms 104, and the female figure is an angel. Still others
think he painted the mural for nature, and all the wonders it had
provided him. He could also have painted the mural to create a
world that he could live in, a place where he could be accepted and
allowed to simply be. Although we'll never know why he painted
it, his mural will always be his greatest work.
Walter Anderson: A Biography,using Approaching the Magic Hour and other sources.
by Jeff Durst (SHS)
 Walter
Anderson was a brilliant man. He was also a little crazy, which
seems to be a trend among great artists. He was a man that lived
in agony caused by his genius and a burning desire to create the world
around him. Walter Anderson changed the face of water color in
the twentieth century, but he was an enigma, neither appreciated nor
understood in his time. He led a rather rocky and interesting
life.
Walter Inglis Anderson was born on September 29, 1903 in New Orleans (The Life of Walter Anderson).
>From the beginning, he showed an interest in art and nature. His
earliest interests were in birds. His mother, Annette McConnell
Anderson, encouraged Walter by giving him sketch books. She was
also an artist, and she felt that she had wasted her skills. To
compensate, she stressed good habits such as writing and drawing every
day to her children. Annette once gave Walter a book with "200
words a day" written on the cover. He scratched out "words" and
wrote "birds" in its place. He had two brothers, Peter and Mac,
whom he often hunted with along with their father (Birds x).
When he was twelve, Walter Anderson was sent
to Manlius Military School in New York State, where he was miserable.
There he would send home brief letters showing an increasing
propensity for art and an increasing closeness to nature.
One such letter read: "I go for a walk in the woods nearly
every day and I have special places where I can go and read
and draw." Years later he told his mother that Manlius
had almost destroyed him (Birds xi). In
1922, with his mother's blessing and his father's scorn, Walter
went to Parson's School of Design in New York. Rural life
had not prepared him for the big city, and there were many detractions
(A Symphony of Animals ix). In 1923 he transferred
to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he excelled and
made money by selling wood carvings. While enrolled at
Pennsylvania, he spent a great deal of time at the zoo, drawing
the animals there. These pictures won him the Packard
Prize for Animal Drawing in 1925 (A Symphony of Animals vii). He also won the Cresson Prize for traveling
and used the money to travel to Paris in 1927 to study the cave
paintings and Gothic cathedrals (A Symphony of Animals x-xi).
It was in 1927 that Walter Anderson met his future
wife, Agnes Grinstead, and he began his strange courtship of
her (Approaching the Magic Hour 1). Walter
was working summers at Shearwater Pottery, which had been started
by his brother Peter in 1928 (A Symphony of Animals xi). Agnes had decided to spend her summer at her parents'
summer home, Oldfields, which was near Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
She spent some time with Walter that summer, and the very next
year he asked her to marry him (Approaching the Magic
Hour 3). Her father disapproved of Walter, but
they were soon married in April, 1933 (Approaching 9).
Walter
Anderson did not have much of a family life. Agnes once said,
"He[Walter] was a painter always, a lover at times, a husband and
father never (A Painter's Psalm 9)." Walter never
wanted to have children and would only accept their third child, Lief,
as being his. During the first years of their marriage, he made
Agnes use birth control because he didn't want to bring a child into a
world "so filled with pain and terror." So he and Agnes lived
together without children of their own in the cabin which had been
given to them as a wedding present (Approaching the Magic Hour 13-14).
After
his father's death in February 1936, Walter Anderson had a mental
breakdown and spent most of the years 1937-1940 in mental hospitals (Birds
xii). After trying to kill himself by jumping in front of a
greyhound bus, Walter was sent to Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, where he
would spend the next year (Approaching the Magic Hour 58).
While a patient at Phipps, he relegated himself into a total state of
apathy. He wouldn't even speak. When a new doctor, Dr.
Mead, took over his case, Walter began to speak. Dr. Mead thought
that Walter felt he had become impotent. When Agnes told him that
she was pregnant with their first child, Walter tried to kill her (Approaching 60). Their daughter Mary was born on December 8, 1937 while Walter was still a patient at Phipps (Approaching 63).
Walter
was released in July of 1938 and sent back to his cabin. He
was frightened by his books and art, and when Agnes presented him with
a clip board, paper, and pencils, he tore the paper to shreds and hit
her over the head with the clip board (Approaching
67). Soon after he was sent to Shepard Pratt Hospital in Towson,
Maryland. He was there for six weeks before pushing a bookcase
over on his attendant and walking home (Approaching 68).
Their
second child, Billy, was born in October of 1939. Walter Anderson
would accept neither child as his and made another attempt on
Agnes's and the children's lives (Approaching
71-72). He was soon in Whitfield, where he began to draw again,
mainly birds. After a short stay, he jumped out of his window,
leaving behind soap pictures of birds on his wall. He then lived
in Jackson, Mississippi, as an outpatient before returning to his family in 1940 (Birds xii).
Upon
Walter's return, the Andersons moved into Oldfields to watch over
Agnes' sick father. Although he remained kind to his children,
Walter became less and less tolerant of family relations and
responsibilities(A Painter's Psalm 8). In May the
Anderson's third child was born, Lief, a girl. Lief was the only
child Walter would ever admit to fathering (Approaching 114). Although the years spent at Oldfields were happy for Walter and his family, he became increasingly disturbed (A Painter's Psalm
8). One Sunday at church he told Agnes: "Normalcy.
All that you give yourself for is to see that I remain normal, to see
that I live in the world and not in a hospital. I am grateful for
these beautiful years, but you have to understand something, too.
I am normal...I must paint. I am going to try to order my life so that this becomes possible" (Approaching 116).
One
night in December, 1946, Mary was suffering from a nagging cough, and
Agnes was pregnant with a fourth child. The girl's cold kept
Walter up, and finally he stormed into the room and declared, "I came
to tell you I'm leaving. I'm not coming back, ever! I can't
take it. I'm an artist; I have to be" (A Painter's Psalm 9).
The
Anderson family saw very little of Walter from that night until his
death in November, 1965. He had to "escape the dominant mode on
shore," as he put it ( Psalm 8). He lived in the
cabin and began spending more and more time on the offshore islands,
particularly Horn Island. When onshore, Walter smoked and drank
to excess, which he did neither of on his islands ( Psalm 9).
After his death, Agnes and her sister Pat opened his cabin for the
first time and discovered a veritable treasure: literally
thousands of Walter Anderson's works. Even more amazing was the
mural they discovered in his little room. Upon entering the room,
Pat exclaimed, "It's the creation at sunrise!" The name stuck (Psalm 12).
Walter
Anderson was a man that lived in a world that could neither understand
nor appreciate him. His was a unique genius: an absolute
understanding of nature and the need to bond with it through
painting. Today, he is considered one of the greatest American
artists, and his works and books are displayed with pride across the
nation.
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A Review
of Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
by Jeff Durst (SHS)
Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson
by Agnes Grinstead Anderson is not so much a biography of Walter
Anderson as it is a look at what life with him was like. It is an
interesting book which provides insight into the atypical life and
times of Walter Anderson. From their days of courtship to the
time he spent institutionalized, Approaching the Magic Hour allows us to look into the mind of one of the most complicated men in the twentieth century.
Approaching the Magic Hour begins
in the summer of 1929 when Agnes first met Walter Anderson. Agnes
knew that Bob, which is what everyone called Walter, was unique.
A year later Walter's brother Peter and Agnes's sister Pat were
married. Walter and Agnes followed suit in 1933. The
book then follows their wonderful and often rocky relationship until
his death in 1965. The reader is allowed to see what life with
Walter Anderson was like, what kind of father he was, and how he dealt
with the world around him. It helps explain why he had to paint
and why he felt it necessary to leave his family.
Approaching the Magic Hour is
an excellent book, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It can only
begin to explain Walter Anderson, but it certainly does a good job
trying.
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Related Web sites
MSWM's page about her husband Walter Anderson.
MSWM's page about daughter Leif Anderson.
A
page with a brief biography of Walter Anderson.
The home page for the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.
Another page for WAMA, the Anderson Museum
Home
page for the Andersons' Shop and Shearwater pottery
Amazon
customers' reviews of Approaching the Magic
Hour.
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Bibliography
Anderson, Agnes Grinstead. Approaching the Magic Hour. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1989
Anderson, Walter. Birds. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1990
Anderson, Walter. A Symphony of Animals. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1996
Sugg, Redding S. A Painter's Psalm. Singapore: Palace Press, 1992
"The Life of Walter Anderson". http://www.motif.org/
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Go to Walter Anderson, his works, books, and life by Chris Jones (SHS)
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