Shepard, E.H.

135 x 230mm, preliminary pencil drawing, unsigned, mounted, framed and glazed, very minor soiling to top right corner

The Artist's Estate; Chris Beetles ("The British Art of Illustration 1800-1995")

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E.H. Shepard produced numerous sketches and studies before preparing a preliminary pencil drawing on paper. Such preliminaries have an attractive roughness as Shepard captures the raw immediacy of creation. When Shepard was satisfied, he would rub a soft pencil over the reverse of the drawing and then trace significant lines through the paper onto artist's board. A final ink drawing would then be created using the faint pencil guide.

This is one of Shepard's preliminary drawings of a new Pooh illustration created for the 1965 volume entitled The Pooh Story Book. First published in the United States by Dutton, the book included three stories: 'A House is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore', 'Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water' and 'Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In'. It was published by Methuen in the U.K. in 1967.

Almost all of Shepard's preliminary pencil drawings for the original four Pooh books (1924-1928) were given to the V&A Museum in the mid 1970s, but Shepard excluded more recent work such as the present piece.

The title-page of the book was a double-page spread with Kanga, Roo, Owl, Rabbit and Tigger on the left-hand side and Eeyore, Christopher Robin, Piglet and Pooh on the right. The background was omitted within the book, but present on the dust-jacket (with the left-hand procession printed on the lower cover and the right-hand procession printed on the upper cover). THIS IS THEREFORE THE PRELIMINARY DRAWING FOR THE UPPER COVER OF THE POOH STORY BOOK.

Shepard has annotated the drawing "Like pp.2+3 half double page spread" and "Colour of Eeyore, Piglet, Pooh, CR".