Walter Anderson's Illustrations of Epic and Voyage

Description

A further relevation of the especial talents of the Ocean Springs, Mississippi, artist, Walter Inglis Anderson. The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson (Memphis, 1973), A Painter’s Psalm (Memphis, 1978) and the award-winning film, The Islander (1978) examined Anderson as a poet, writer, potter, naturalist, watercolorist, and muralist. Here Redding Sugg introduces us to Anderson as an illustrator of classic literature.

Walter Anderson’s legacy includes at least 9,500 graphic ren­derings of characters and scenes from classic literature. From this prodigious output Sugg has selected 120 pen-and-ink illus­trations for this book. In his Introduction Sugg provides a bio­graphical sketch plus an analytical evaluation of this fascinating artist’s work.

The book is divided into three categories: “Figures and Atti­tudes,” composed of single figures such as Polydamas, Priam, Ros-cranna, Orlando, Angelica, and Don Quixote; “Scenes,” featuring interactions between characters; and “Sequences,” consisting of series from Pope’s Iliad, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, and Bullfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne. Each series creates the illusion of movement, as in an animated cartoon.

Other illustrations are from Paradise Regained, Temora from The Poems of Ossian, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Faust, and Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.

Anderson drew at night, often working into the morning. Drawings accumulated, littered the table, fell to the floor. There he was content to abandon them, but his wife collected them each morning.

Mrs. Anderson describes a typical scene: “Sometimes in the very early morning, when he was just stopping, I would catch him quietly feeding, with a teaspoon, coffee to a couple of very large oaktree cockroaches who seemed to be his pets, and he would laugh, gently but pointedly, when I objected… He said they were his ‘familiars.’ The illustrations seemed, certainly, to take the place of any interest in more usual things such as sex. Often, we would hear him singing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or the Emperor Concerto; he often worked to his own or someone else’s music.”

Walter Inglis Anderson (1903–1965) studied at Parsons In­stitute, New York; was graduated from the Pennsylvania Acad­emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and studied in France on a Cresson Award. A retrospective traveling exhibition, “The World of Walter Anderson” which included ceramics, drawings, oils, prints, sculpture, and watercolors was mounted in 1967 by Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis.

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