Artist in watercolour, pen and ink and oil; exemplary illustrator of almost 100 books. Born in London, his father was a keen amateur watercolourist, his mother’s was the Dicksee family, which produced several painters. His sister, Mary Shepard, married the Punch editor E V Knox (“Evoe”), and was notable as the illustrator of P L Travers’ Mary Poppins books, a job declined by E H Shepard because he was too busy. Shepard studied at Heatherley’s Art School from 1896, then entered the Royal Academy Schools on a scholarship, 1897–1901, and first exhibited at the RA in that year. His painting Followers was bought from the RA by Durban Art Gallery in 1904. Punch took his first drawing in 1906, he joined its staff in 1921, became its senior political cartoonist in 1945 and did his last drawings for the magazine in 1958.