[6] Here (1924–1928) he would study under iconoclastic modernists like Henry McCarter, Hugh Breckenridge, and Arthur Carles, winning a Packard Award for his animal drawing and a Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which allowed him to spend a summer in France.

[7] Anderson moved to Ocean Springs after his years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked as a designer in the family business, Shearwater Pottery.

In 1928-29 he designed his earliest ceramic pieces: pelican and crab bookends, lampstands, peculiar "Resting" and "Sitting Geometric Cat"; a "Horse and Rider" and innumerable plates and vases.

Among his early projects, launched with his younger brother James ("Mac"), was a "Shearwater Pottery Annex" which produced inexpensive figurines, giving Anderson enough of an income in 1932 to marry Agnes Grinstead[6] an art history graduate of Radcliffe College, who would later write a poignant memoir of their life together (Approaching the Magic Hour).

Paintings from this period include: "Indians Hunting"; "Jockeys Riding Horses"; four oil portraits of Sissy, 1933–37; "Black Skimmer"; "Androcles and Lion"; "Man on Horse"; and Birth of Achilles (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art); along with watercolors of flowers, animals, and birds; studies for a projected book on birds of the southeastern U.S.; and linoleum blockprints, including "Tourist Cards;" "Alphabet"; nursery rhymes; "On the River"; "Valkyries"; "Butterfly Book"; and scenes from Shearwater Pottery.

Designs for a second mural, in the Jackson, Mississippi, Court House, were accepted by an illustrious committee then rejected by a Washington bureaucrat, causing Anderson considerable frustration.

This disappointment, coupled with the death of his father in 1937, lingering bouts of both malaria and undulant fever, and the struggle to eke out a living with work he detested (manufacturing figurines) led to a mental breakdown, with psychotic episodes, in 1937.

They are a radiant hymn to light and to the beauty of one day on the Coast, beginning on the east wall with sunrise and continuing around the room through noon, sunset and night.

There was extensive water damage to the watercolors, drawings, manuscripts, and other objects that were kept there, and much of this work, from the Anderson Family collection, was dried and removed to Mississippi State University.