Ernest Howard Shepard OBE, MC (1879 – 1976) was an English artist and book illustrator. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts, and later worked for Punch magazine as a cartoonist and illustrator.
The collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, both of whom worked for Punch, led to the book When We Were Very Young (1924) and the classic Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Their partnership was one of the most important in the history of illustrated literature.
Shephard worked mostly in pencil and varied texture with shading. He used soft pencils for shrubbery and more abstract mark making in contrast to his trees, where he would be much more precise. He would then ink over these drawings on a separate page, and towards the end of his life his illustrations were even coloured through the use of light washes of color and graphic, black outlines.
E. H. Shepard is also known as the illustrator of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1931).
Read about Winnie-the-Pooh’s 90 + year journey from pencil sketch to a Disney icon HERE.
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