by a family friend, Ellsworth Woodward, Anderson painted an ambitious mural in the auditorium of the Ocean Springs Public School ("Ocean Springs Past and Present") as part of Public Works of Art Project. 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. Oldfields In 1941, Anderson moved to Gautier, Mississippi, to live on his wife's father's estate (Oldfields) with his family. An extraordinarily productive period followed. Freed from his work at the Pottery, he had time to draw, paint and make block prints; to illustrate some of his favorite books; to experiment with theories of dynamic symmetry and with the drawing methods of the Mexican artist and educator Adolfo Best Maugard; and to translate from Spanish part of Jose Pijoan's history of art (probably without realizing that the work had already been translated into English). Horn Island The Oldfields period came to an end in 1945 when he left his family and moved back to a cottage at Shearwater. From then until his death in 1965 he lived a reclusive life, working as a decorator at the Pottery and making frequent excursions in a rowboat sometimes rigged with a sail, from Ocean Springs to Horn Island, Mississippi, where he lived in primitive conditions and portrayed the life around him - birds, sea creatures, animals, trees, landscapes - in radiant watercolors and in a series of logbooks. He also ventured abroad to Costa Rica and China, and made numerous bicycle trips, on some of which he traveled for thousands of miles. "The wheels are turning again", he once wrote. "A bicycle seems to leave no room for other