Shepard, Ernest H (1879 - 1976)

Ernest H Shepard original cartoon artwork.

Ernest H Shepard worked first as a painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1901. His cartoons began to appear in Punch in 1907 and he worked for the magazine until 1954, joining the Punch Table in 1921. Despite being a political cartoonist for the majority of his career, E H Shepard gained greatest fame as a book illustrator, most notably for ‘When We Were Very Young’ and the subsequent ‘Pooh’ volumes, written by A.A. Milne, also a Punch contributor. Fougasse described Shepard as ‘one of the great line draughtsmen’ and Price, Punch’s biographer, felt Shepard’s contributions tended to make the rest of the magazine’s illustrations look ‘static’.