Almost a century ago, Annette McConnell Anderson, a New Orleans society woman, vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband---a grain merchant---she bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou, in the shade of towering pines and magnolias, she opened an art colony, one of the first of its kind in the South.

Backed by his mother's passion for art, her oldest son Peter Anderson founded Shearwater Pottery. Yearning -to make Shearwater synonymous with perfection, - he drew...