Mary Shepard

Above: Mary Poppins By P.L Travers First US Edition 1934, illustrated by Mary Shepard 

Mary Shepard (1909-2000), was the daughter of artist Florence Eleanor Chaplin ( 1876-1927) who died suddenly aged 51 and illustrator Earnest Shepard (1879-1976) who originally illustrated A. A. Milne's 'Winnie the Poo' and Kenneth Grahame's 'Wind in the Willows'. 

Above: Florence Eleanor Chaplin. Below: Ernest Shepard

Above: Mary Shepard and her brother Graham Shepard. 

Mary's brother Graham Shepard, was an illustrator and cartoonist, who worked for the Illustrated London News. He served in the RNVR during World War II and was lost along with all but one crew member when their ship, HMS Polyanthus, was sunk by the German submarine U-952 in the mid-Atlantic on 21 September 1943.

Above: Mary Shepard 1925 aged 16.

At 26 years old Mary Shepard married E. V. Knox (1881-1971) in 1937, 27 years her senior, who was editor of Punch from 1932-49. It was his second marriage, his first was to  Christina Frances Hicks (1885-1935) with whom he had a daughter Penelope who was to become a writer and biographer. 

Mary Shepard illustrated all eight of P.L.Traver's Mary Poppins books for over a fifty year period between  1934 -1988. However the relationship was sometimes fraught with Pamela Lyndon Travers, Travers was ten years Mary Shepards senior and far more confident. She saw the illustrations as servants of the text rather than artworks in their own right. 

This has annoyed me since I read it over two weeks ago when researching these 'Mary Poppins' posts. It annoys me today when writers are mentioned for heavily illustrated books or long standing collaborations and not the illustrator, it is the reason I focus on illustrators so heavily in this blog, trying in my own way to push back. To my mind the writing and illustration are dancing partners, some times one takes the lead more in a book, when excellent, they both bring the beauty to the dance of a story.

Above: Mary Shepard

Later there would be along standing disagreement between author and illustrator over the issue of copyright for the Mary Poppins illustrations. 

Luckily Mary Shepard always retained the copyright on her own illustrations. However when the Mary Poppins movie came out, Mary Shepard did not receive any portion of the multimillion dollars in box office profits, mainly for reasons that will become clear in later posts, though Mary's agent did manage to get copyright monies of £1000 for the position of Mary Poppins feet.

Above: Mary Poppins A to Z published in 1962

Above and Below illustrations with balloons in which Mary Shepard has included herself and the author Pamela Lyndon Travers. 

Above: Scratchboard sketch by Mary Shepard showing Mary Poppins with other characters in the story, who are constellations.

Above: Sketch for the park keeper. Below the park keeper cries in the lap of the bird woman with orion looking on.