Ernest Shepard

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Ernest Howard Shepard (born December 10, 1879 in the City of Westminster in London , † March 24, 1976 in Midhurst , West Sussex ) was an English illustrator ( Winnie the Pooh , The Wind in the Willows ).

Life

Ernest Howard Shepard was born in St John's Wood, a suburb of the City of Westminster in London , to the architect Henry Dunkin Shepard and his wife Jessie Harriet Lee Shepard. He had an older sister (Ethel, * 1876) and an older brother (Cyril, * 1877). His maternal grandfather was the watercolorist William Lee (1809–1865). The parents encouraged their second son to be an artist as a toddler. He first attended St. John's Wood Preparatory School and the Church of England School on Baker Street . When Ernest was eleven years old, his mother died suddenly. Henry Shepard sent his children to Bloomsbury to live with his four unmarried sisters for several years . At age 14, Ernest attended St. Paul's School in Hammersmith , one of the oldest private schools in England, and the Heatherly School of Fine Arts in Mayfair . From 1897 to 1902 he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts . In 1898 he received the Landseer Scholarship and in 1900 he won the British Institution Prize. In 1901 he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy.

After numerous attempts, his first two drawings were accepted by the satirical magazine Punch in 1907 , for which he then worked regularly. Shepard admired the cartoonists Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836–1875), Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) and above all Charles Samuel Keene (1823–1891). Around the same time he received orders from the Scottish-American publisher Thomas Nelson to work on a series of classic youth literature, to which u. a. Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1812–1870) involved creating colored book covers and black and white illustrations. He also illustrated children's books by other publishers, such as in 1915 for T. Nelson & Sons both The Chartered Company: a tale of Cailsthorpe College by Charles Harold Avery (1867–1943) and “The Little Rajah” by Lucy Pauline Wright (c. 1847 -1913). The First World War had already broken out.

On December 14, 1915, Shepard received his patent as an artillery officer for the 105th Seige Battery and was posted to France, Belgium and Italy. His brother Cyril died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. In 1917 he was promoted to the rank of captain and shortly before his return in 1919 to major . Shepard was awarded the Military Cross for meritorious combat service. During his military service he continued to work as a cartoonist and sent his drawings home by field post . In June 1921 he was offered a permanent position in the editorial team of Punch .

In 1924 AA Milne was looking for a draftsman for an illustrated new edition of his children's verse When We Were Very Young by Methuen & Co., London. He asked the writer and punch author Edward Verrall Lucas (1868–1938) for advice. Lucas recommended Ernest Shepard, but Milne initially had concerns. Shepard's drawing style seemed unsuitable to him. Even so, he tried the professional cartoonist. Thanks to the illustrations, the book became an unexpected success. Therefore, it asked Milne to illustrate the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh , the bear of very little brain (Engl. "Bear of very little brain"), released in the fall of 1926 in Milne's House publisher Methuen. While Shepard portrayed the author's four-year-old son, Christopher Robin , as a template for the child-like bear friend, he was dissatisfied with Christopher's plush bear. Instead, he drew the beloved teddy bear Growler as the protagonist of his now adolescent son Graham. Winnie-the-Pooh became a sensational bestseller and to this day one of the most printed children's books of all time. When the stories were filmed by the Walt Disney Studios from the late 1960s , the animators were careful to preserve the charm of Shepard's drawings and to animate the characters as true to the original as possible.

Shepard also illustrated Milne's books Now We Are Six (1927) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). In total, he procured the picture decorations for 34 books. His collaboration with Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932), whose autobiographical influenced works The Golden Age (1928) and Dream Days (1930) he illustrated, was particularly significant . AA Milne had dramatized the children's book Grahames The Wind In The Willows , first published in 1908 under the title Toad of Toad Hall in 1930 . The success of the play resulted in a new edition of the book in 1931, which differed significantly from the previous ones. Ernest Shepard provided numerous illustrations. Once again, his sensitive drawings contributed to an overwhelming public success.

Shepard's grave in Lodsworth

Shepard continued to draw after the Second World War . In 1958 he created color illustrations for The World of Pooh and in 1959 for The World of Christopher Robin . In 1965 he published the youth book Ben and Brock, written and drawn by him, and Betsy and Joe in 1966 . He also brought out the two autobiographies Drawn from Memory (1957) and Drawn from Life (1961).

In 1969 he donated 300 original drawings to the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington on his 90th birthday. The University of Surrey has the largest collection of personal documents and the University of Kent has many original Punch caricatures. As early as the 1960s, the original versions of his children's book drawings were auctioned off by the Sotheby’s auction house in the “juvenalia” category (such as “youth objects”). In December 1985 and December 2002 the London outpatient gallery Sally Hunter Fine Art held commercial solo exhibitions of Shepard's works.

family

Ernest Shepard married Florence Chaplin in 1904, with whom he had two children, their son Graham (* 1907) and their daughter Mary (* 1909). His first wife Florence died in 1927. On September 20, 1943, his son Graham died as a soldier in the sinking of the corvette HMS Polyanthus after a German torpedo attack . In the same year he married his second wife, Norah Carrol. His daughter Mary Shepard, who became a successful book artist herself and illustrated seven Mary Poppins editions of PL Travers (1899–1996) between 1933 and 1988 , died on September 4, 2000 in London.

literature

  • Rawle Knox (Ed.): The work of EH Shepard . Methuen, London 1979, ISBN 0-416-86770-7 . 256 pp.
  • Ernest H. Shepard: Drawn from memory, Drawn from life. The autobiography of Ernest H. Shepard . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-413-14400-3 . 400 pp.

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