Can there be any body of work more quintessentially British than the drawings of E. H. Shephard? For it was this book illustrator who brought to life the characters from Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows. These two collaborations alone are enough to guarantee his place in the history of book illustration, but they are only a fraction of his work.
Shephard also illustrated many less-famous books, worked as a political cartoonist for on Punch magazine and produced numerous pen-and-ink drawings that stand in their own right. And there is now a chance to collect some of this work at the Fine Art Society’s selling exhibition of drawings and paintings by Shephard from December 6 to 21, with most of the work priced between £300 to £1,000.
“Shephard was simply one of the most brilliant draftsmen of his day,” says Gordon Cook, director of the Fine Art Society. “When he came together with great authors, such as A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame, the result was greater than the sum of the two parts. Shephard had a genius for producing drawings that say everything they need to without overdoing it. They get exactly the right amount of information across.”
It should be said that Pooh doesn’t feature in the sale. A Pooh drawing can now be expected to fetch as much as £80,000, but the sale does include a pencil design for an Easter card featuring Ratty and Mole, priced at £10,000.
While those represent the Holy Grail for collectors in the area, Shephard’s other work is considerably less expensive and well within reach of a more modest purse. Sally Hunter, curator of the the exhibition, says: “People forget that, apart from the famous ones, he worked for Punch and illustrated more than 80 other books.”
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Yet even these works have risen substantially in value over the past four decades, as book illustrations have become more sought after.
Ernest Howard Shephard was born in St John’s Wood, London, in 1879 and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1897. Ten years later he placed his first cartoon in Punch, before being commissioned into the Royal Artillery in December 1915. He continued to draw throughout the war and in 1921 was appointed to the staff of Punch. Three years later he was asked to illustrate some verses written by A. A. Milne, which eventually appeared under the title When We Were Very Young, and his reputation was assured.
A long-term collaboration with Milne followed and in 1931 his reputation received an even greater boost with the publication of The Wind in the Willows. But the originals of book illustrations were not collected then. They tended to gather dust in publishers’ offices, albeit it still the property of the original artist. Although many were destroyed, a great deal of Shephard’s work survived. Because he lived until he was 97, Shephard also had the satisfaction of seeing his work attract great interest in its own right.
The Fine Art Society has more than 400 pen-and-ink drawings on offer, including some of the drawings for Mother Goose, which was never published.
One unframed picture, There Was an Old Woman Tossed up in a Basket, is only £290. There is also a charming series of drawings for The Flattered Flying Fish, written by I.E. Rieu and published in 1962. Among them is The Happy Hedgehog, at £650.
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“There is also the nostalgia value,” Ms Hunter says, reflecting on what makes Shephard’s illustrations so popular. “And they are memorable images: a precise way of setting out a scene.”
Or, to put it another way, perfection at a very good price.