Ernest Howard Shepard (December 10 1879– March 24 1976) was a British artist and book illustrator. He was known especially for his human-like animals in illustrations for The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne.
He was born in St. John's Wood, London. He served in the Army during World War I, winning the Military Cross for bravery in the field. He sent jokes about the battles to Punch, and after the war joined the magazine, through which he eventually met Milne.
He began his illustration career selling weekly cartoons to Punch.
Shepard said that he modeled Pooh not on the toy owned by Christopher Robin, Milen's son, but on a stuffed bear owned by his own son. His Pooh work is so famous that 300 of his preliminary sketches was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969, when he was 90 years old.
Shepard wrote two autobiographies: Drawn from Memory (1957) and Drawn From Life (1962).
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