Walter Anderson’s house from 1947 until his death in 1965 barely survived Hurricane Katrina. The storm surge that washed away artworks from his nearby studio lifted Anderson’s cottage and laid it back down listing. Its situation attracted the international attention that eluded the artist in his lifetime, and the cottage has since been restored.
Artist Annette McConnell Anderson and her husband George bought the peninsula now known as Shearwater in 1918 as a summer retreat from New Orleans. They became permanent residents in 1922, and in 1928 their eldest son, Peter, opened Shearwater Pottery here. His brother, Walter Inglis Anderson (1903–1965), studied painting at the Parsons Institute of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Ocean Springs in 1928, where he worked painting ten pots a week. Frustrated by commercial restraints, subject to ailments, and depressed by his father’s death, Anderson suffered a mental breakdown in 1937 and was treated at various institutions including the Mississippi State Hospital (JM84). In 1941, he moved to his wife’s family home, Oldfields (1901 Waters Edge Drive), in Gautier, where he produced drawings, paintings, and block prints. In 1947 he returned to Shearwater and renovated this cottage. He made frequent solitary pilgrimages to nearby Horn Island and produced thousands of distinctive watercolor drawings depicting Gulf Coast flora and fauna.
Anderson’s side-gabled Shearwater cottage was probably built around 1900 as a two-room servant’s house ancillary to the antebellum main house, Fairhaven. Anderson removed the wall between the two rooms, installed sliding doors, added larger windows to the north, and extended the front porch; he also made white and blue bricks for a new chimney. His vivid and swirling nature scenes decorate the walls, but his most private vision for the “Little Room,” which he always kept locked, is a mural, Creation at Sunrise, an interpretation of Psalm 104. This room was removed to the Walter Anderson Museum (GC37) in 1991 and a replica built in its place. The other historic buildings at Shearwater to survive Katrina are the frame workshop complex on Shearwater Drive.