Birds

This new edition of Birds brings the classic 1990 volume back into print while expanding it with more than one hundred new images drawn from the Permanent Collection of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, the Family of Walter Anderson, the Mississippi Museum of Art, and private collections. These works reveal the skill, feeling, and imagination of the man who has become known as "the South’s most elusive artist."

Anderson, who lived and worked on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was an artist, naturalist, and philosopher whose work has been the subject of numerous books and exhibitions. Preferring a life apart from the mainstream, he created thousands of artworks before his death in 1965—paintings, drawings, carvings, ceramics, and designs that together define a singular American vision.

In this volume, Anderson explores the union of all living things through one of his favorite and most enduring subjects. Birds, for this solitary artist, proved the most accessible of models. He rendered them in watercolor, oil, ink, pencil, clay, and wood. Motifs of birds appear on the objects he created—plates, cups, wallpaper, and textiles—reflecting the evolution of his art and his sustained engagement with the natural world.

In addition to the celebrated essay by the artist’s daughter Mary Anderson Pickard, this expanded edition includes a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jack E. Davis, along with essays by Mattie Codling, director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, and the museum’s arts and environmental educator, Sandra Bilbo. Together, these pieces illuminate Anderson’s enduring significance as an artist, naturalist, and thinker.