Quick Review

Drawn From Life by Ernest H. Shepard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The second of the artist's two autobiographies, and every bit as delightful as the first. Where Drawn from Memory recreated a charmed Victorian childhood in both gentle prose and pictures, the sequel takes Shepard from his boyhood into his apprenticeship and marriage and so has something more to tell. Together the two volumes tell the happy story of a good life, not altogether untouched by tragedy, but shaped by a sunny memory and a sharp eye.

And the drawings! As might be expected, again, it is Shepard's line; his quick, busy, witty pen and pencil that elevate the whole enterprise from the general run of books memorializing the great summer of Edwardian England. Despite the setting and the costumes, etc., Shepard the artist is very much a man of the mid-century last -- he clearly was trained in an older style; set scenes, with cross-hatched shadows and stiff, thick-lined profiles, but Shepard brings a more modern sensibility to his pictures. There's always a sketchy electricity: long quick strokes for clothes and shadow and hedges, and an often loose, almost painterly composition that allows his otherwise frenetic lines to settle and coalesce, but never go static or lifeless.

Even the simplest scene has life in it. Take for example, almost at random, a rather humble back garden on page 54. Even without the accompanying text, there's clearly a narrative here, a joke even: in the foreground a clearly agitated bird hops and squawks on the garden-path. Following the bird's gaze up the garden wall, a fat striped cat is making an imperfect escape. In the middle distance sits an open birdcage on the grass. It's not a bad joke. What makes the drawing interesting as something other than just that, and interesting even above being just illustration of the actual text, is the same accuracy and energy as in the full page drawing of a market on the facing page. That back garden, seemingly sketched from the day rather than memory; detailed down to the drainpipe, the rain-barrel, but the bricks roughed in in the same short, lines as the shadow down the windows, as the edging on the walk, the little darts for grass. Again, as much as the busy market on the facing page, everywhere in Shepard's drawing is a sense of life, of animation, of an artist's pleasure in his craft and economy.

(I've always thought that among the most curious disappointments in Disney's deeply disappointing version of Wind in the Willows was that even as the animators paced not just Toad but the whole story like a frantic Hal Roach short -- thus missing the entire point, by the way -- those same Disney artists found none of the manic charm and propulsive energy in every single Shepard drawing of Mr. Toad. Shepard's Toad is Churchillian, balletic, and still somehow, often as not, an almost real, warty, web-footed toad, even in evening wear. Disney's was a squirting bar of green soap. Bizarre.)

I'm not one to collect illustrated books much for the sake of the pictures. But the man who drew Winnie the Pooh et al, is not just another illustrator, and his life and art constitutes, for me at least, an entirely admirable record of great good humor and fun.



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