Ernest H. Shepard was born in 1879 in London. His father was an architect and his mother (who died when he was ten years old) was the daughter of a notable watercolorist. It was she who first encouraged young Ernest to paint and draw. Art became Ernest's passion, and after attending Heatherly's Art School and the Royal Acadamy Schools, Shepard supported himself by drawing for the illustrated papers and by illustrating books.
In 1903, Shepard married Florence Chaplin. Florence was a mural painter and fellow student at the Academy. The Shepards had two children: Graham, who was killed in World War II, and Mary, who later illustrated Mary L. Travers Mary Poppins books.
When World War I broke out, Shepard served in France, Belgium, and Italy, attaining the rank of Major. On his return to England, he continued with his art. He became a regular contributor to Punch, the classic British humor magazine, where he met A. A. Milne, a man who was to be instrumental to his career. Shepard was elected to the editorial board of Punch, and shortly thereafter, he agreed to do the illustrations for Milne's first book of verse, When We Were Very Young.
The illustrations that Shepard created for all four of the Pooh books received worldwide acclaim. For the next thirty years, he continued to illustrate books for both adults and children. In 1973, for the first time, he added color to his drawings for Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard ultimately donated several hundred drawings to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Ernest H. Shepard continued to pursue his love of drawing until his death in 1976. (copyright 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.)
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I worked on a Wind in the Willows project a couple of years ago, photographing sample art from more than 20 versions, and researching many of the 90+ in existence. There are some fantastic artists--Arthur Rackham, Tasha Tudor, Michael Hague, and Robert Ingpen among them--but in my many conversations with others, Ernest Shepard is most often cited as their favorite illustrator. He wasn't even the first (rather, the fourth) illustrator for the book, but he was the last Grahame approved before he passed away in 1932.
The two met via A. A. Milne. Shepard had (as everyone knows) illustrated Milne's famous Pooh and poetry books (1924-28)--in fact, When We Were Very Young was the first book with Shepard's illustrations ever published. After Milne crafted a stage play of Grahame's story, called Toad of Toad Hall (published and produced in 1929), he introduced Grahame and Shepard, which is a short version of how that collaboration began.
But even after Grahame's death, Shepard wasn't done with him yet. Grahame hadn't written that many books, and Shepard worked with nearly all of them. While he never touched Pagan Papers (1894, a series of essays) or Headswoman (1898, a satiric novel about women's suffrage), Shepard interacted with the rest--posthumously illustrating Grahame's famous short story Reluctant Dragon in 1939, re-illustrating his Victorian childhood memoirs Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898)--both originally inked by Maxfield Parrish--and finally did the art for one story from First Whispers of Wind in the Wlliows, called Bertie's Escapade (1949).
Shepard worked for Punch Magazine and illustrated more than 50 other books over the course of his career, all of which have been eclipsed by Pooh and Wind in the Willows. It's outside of the scope of this post to discuss them all, but I wanted to draw a couple of connections.
First, like Grahame, Ernest Shepard wrote (and also illustrated) a pair of memoirs. These books were published late and describe his early life. Drawn from Memories (1957), which covers 1887, the Golden Jubilee year in which he turned eight, is an account of a happy, loving child gazing up at the adult world. Drawn from Life (1961) opens with his mother's death at age ten and covers the challenging years that followed until his marriage to Florence Eleanor Chaplin in 1904.
Second, Shepard's kids also became illustrators. His son Graham did political cartoons for the Illustrated London News before his life was tragically cut short during WWII, when a German UBoat sunk his ship, HMS Polyanthus. Ernest's daughter Mary became best-known for Mary Poppins (1934) by P.L. Travers. They had a long collaboration and Mary spent most of her professional career illustrating all eight books in the series. She did little else that I know of, except for Pigeon Post (from Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series) and a book called Prince Rabbit and The Princess Who Could Not Laugh. This pair of short stories, posthumously published in 1966, served as a tribute to her father's old friend A. A. Milne, the man who started it all, and makes a satisfying conclusion to my tangled web!
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