James McConnell Anderson

Who was James McConnell Anderson?

James McConnell "Mac" Anderson was an American painter, muralist, and pottery designer and decorator, youngest of the three brothers who collaborated at Shearwater Pottery, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Born in New Orleans, Anderson attended schools there and in Chattanooga, graduating in 1926, and studied briefly at Tulane University with William Spratling before devoting himself to the family business. In Shearwater's third year of existence, he joined his brother Walter in a new business venture, "the Shearwater Annex", where, over the years, the two of them designed and produced inexpensive decorative objects ranging from sets of ceramic baseball and football players, to humorous figurines of Southern blacks and legendary pirates, to lamp bases, and smaller objects called "widgets", which "filled spaces in the kiln under the larger pieces to increase the value of the firing". Characteristic pieces included the baseball player series, woodpecker mugs, small fish and animals. The figurines, which appealed to Gulf Coast tourists, received national publicity in the early 1930s and helped Shearwater survive the Depression.