He won the British Institution open etching scholarship of £50 a year.  His winning etching ‘A Head Study’ (Catalogue No. 9) could be viewed by art masters and students at the Royal Academy of Arts.  Two months later on 1 January 1909 he arrived in London to begin his studies in the freedoms of etching and drypoint at the Royal Collage of Art under the expert instruction of Sir Frank Short (1857-1945) President of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers and Engravers.  Anderson became an Associate of the Society in 1910.  

With neither encouragement nor money from his parents, he was undaunted by annual funds of only £50 to sustain his two year scholarship.  He took a furnished room in Chelsea Square and spent his days studying in the warmth of the local library where not only technical books but models could be sought ‘free of charge’!  He also studied in the London Museums and Art Galleries, and took inspiration from the London Streets. 

Although Anderson had exhibited two prints at the Royal Academy in his first year, was able to get a small amount of hack work to eke out his meagre resources and was encouraged by artists, his life was hard.  In August 1910 he married Lilian Phelps (1884-1967) the daughter of a master builder, and the couple moved to Bentham Garden Suburb in Ealing, West London.

When his scholarship ended in 1911 Anderson briefly attended William Lee-Hankey’s evening classes in etching at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, but found that art classes disturbed his concentration and so he did most of his study in the print room of the British Museum, as the visitor’s book confirms.  There he formed an abiding love for Durer and for Rembrandt, Goya and the late masters Jean-Francois Millet and Charles Meryon. 

His dedication and tenacity helped him surmount difficulties of finance and health and to maintain himself until the outbreak of war in 1914.  His first trip abroad in 1911 took him to Normandy where he made drawings for etchings of Rouen and Chartres (Catalogue No. 42,43,44). A visit to Paris in 1914 was cut short by Germany’s declaration of war on France.  Anderson rushed back home losing all his belongings at the port of Dieppe except for a couple of sketches, Paris Tenements (Catalogue No. 81) and Mobilisation Day, Le Pont Neuf, Paris (Catalogue No. 82).  

During the war, the Andersons moved to Eltham, near Woolwich, where he was engaged in munitions work.  Now in his early thirties, he was repeatedly rejected as unfit for active service owing to a weak heart.  Although he continued to produce etchings, his career was in effect put on hold. In 1916 for example, just three (Catalogue Nos. 89, 90, 91).  His creative energy severely curtailed by war production, Anderson struggled to find purpose.  Towards the end of the war, he expressed his anger about the conflict and the physical and spiritual ruin it wrought, in a series of twelve watercolour caricatures of life and death.

In 1922 Anderson was commissioned to produce a print the size of a postage stamp,  for the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls House, A Devon Barn (Catalogue No. 144) on display in Windsor Castle.  The miniature house was being furnished and decorated by noted artists, designers, craftsmen and writers and was completed in 1924. 

Moving back to Chelsea after the war Anderson found it difficult to resume his career.  He recommenced part-time teaching at Chelsea School of Art and also taught at Putney School of Art.  His wife occasionally took up private nursing in order to augment their income, having once been a nurse at St. Thomas’s Hospital.  Anderson portrayed her some years later in The Sister (Catalogue No. 198).  Together they had two sons, Ivan (1911-1995) who followed a career in banking and in later life did much to preserve his father’s legacy, and Maxim (1914-1959) who became a BAFTA award winning director of documentary films, before his early death.

In 1923 Anderson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.  He was one of many etchers and drypointists to achieve claim in the 1920’s, among them his friends Henry Rushbury (1889-1968), Gerald Brockhurst (1890-1978) and Malcolm Osbourne (1880-1963).  By the age of 40 Anderson had set his course with self imposed disciplines through which to exploit his talents.  His compositions show the contiguous relationships between man and his surroundings such as tools, implements of agriculture, buildings and places of worship. He had a great sympathy for the underdog, the down and out, the blind and the aged.  He shows them occupying (taking possession of) public spaces such as museums, libraries, park benches and archways.  Wreckage (Catalogue No. 138), By Products (Catalogue No 143), Landlopers (Catalogue No.157) Venus and Adonis (Catalogue No. 158).

In 1933 Anderson bought a cottage in the small rural village of Towersey in Oxfordshire, the same year that he produced the first of what became a series of line engravings on the theme of rural crafts, trade and labour, The Farm Hand (Catalogue No. 205).  Although he had made line engravings as early as 1917, William Palmer Robbins R.E. (Catalogue No. 93), there are only eight such works noted between 1917 and 1925.  It was not until 1929, The Fallen Star (Catalogue No. 187) that this medium became prevalent in Anderson’s creative output.  From 1924 to 1939 he alternated between engraving and drypoint, his final drypoint being Timms Smithy, Thame (Catalogue No. 211). 

It was Anderson’s dream to live in the country and when in 1941 his London home and studio were destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War, he and his wife moved out of London to settle permanently in Towersey.  The prints he produced from the mid 1930’s onwards are almost exclusively of rural subjects.  Anderson’s endeavour was to record and preserve traditional trades and crafts.  He was at his most content when making exhaustive studies of craftsmen pursuing their callings, surrounded by their tools and handiwork, often outside in all weathers.   These include The Farm Hand (Catalogue No. 205), The Wheelwright (Catalogue No. 224), Sheep Shearing (Catalogue No. 233), The Thatcher (Catalogue No 242), The Rake Makers (Catalogue No. 253).  

Editions of forty to fifty were made, later up to sixty five, each print selling for 3 guineas.  The full editions were often sold out, he considered the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy to be a very good ‘shop window’, as he described it.  He had a loyal following of admirers who bought from him and he recorded his sales meticulously.  These later prints were signed on the plate with his initials ‘SA’ in a monogram within a triangle.  Lasting records of English rural life and its crafts before their disappearance and they may well be considered his most important achievement.  

Anderson contributed twenty five watercolour paintings to Kenneth Clark’s ‘Recording Britain’ Project, mainly depicting rural country market squares and thatched cottages not unlike his own.  Scenes of Painswick in Gloucestershire, Witney in Oxfordshire and  nearer to home, Thame. The project was suggested by Kenneth Clark and Arnold Palmer and launched in 1939 under the auspices of the Pilgrim Trust and the Committee on the employment of artists in wartime.  

In 1938 Anderson was the sole representative of British line-engraving at the Venice Biennial International Art Exhibition.  He was a member of the engraving faculty of the British School in Rome from 1930 to 1952.  In 1934 he was made an ARA and in 1941 RA.  He was appointed CBE in 1951.  His work was widely exhibited and is still represented in Britain, USA, Europe and as far as Australia and New Zealand.  

In 1953 worsening neuritis in his right arm and hand ended his career as an engraver.  He presented to the Royal Academy a collection of chosen impressions of his prints together with a number of preparatory drawings.  From then on he worked exclusively in watercolours reflecting aspects of farming life and farm animals.  Later, Anderson’s watercolour paintings were less concerned with the work of the farmer or labourer who he could no longer observe closely, but perseverance was the heart of his philosophy and he captured the changing weather conditions and seasonal cycles, Autumn: Early Morning Mist (1956) and Early Morning in Winter (1960).

Anderson’s last home was in Chearsley, Buckinghamshire, where he lived with his wife Lilian for three years until his death on 4th March 1966.  It was just a few miles from Towersey and close to the towns and villages of Thame, Long Crendon and Nether Winchendon where he had studied, drawn and befriended the farmers and craftsmen whose work had been the subject of his prints and watercolours for three decades.

Anderson was shy, reticent and vulnerable, but in the company of fellow artists and craftsmen he was relaxed and expansive.  An affectionate and generous man, loyal to his students, he was an artist of integrity and social conscience.  At times a stern critic with no time for meretricious individuals or those slovenly of mind or manners.  His self criticism was harsh and work he was not entirely happy with, he burnt!  

Anderson’s prints are in the Royal Academy, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.  The Ashmolean’s Department of Western Art holds the most comprehensive collection of Anderson’s prints and drawings.