Overdrawn

Published 27 March 2006

Art - William Cook on the artist who came to hate his best-known creation

Ernest Howard Shepard may not be a household name, but this late, great illustrator has at least one thing in common with many more fam-ous artists - he became celebrated for a light-hearted sideline, rather than his more serious work. A leading political cartoonist for more than 30 years, he is now best remembered (if at all) for drawing toads and teddy bears.

It's easy to understand his irritation. After winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy, he fought in the First World War, sketching in the trenches and winning the Military Cross while he was at it. In 1921 he joined the staff of Punch, becoming the magazine's principal cartoonist - a position he held until Malcolm Muggeridge dispensed with him in 1953.

Yet it is not his political cartoons (or his war work) which have endured, but part-time jobs that he did for Kenneth Grahame and A A Milne. "The Man Who Hated Pooh!", which has just opened at the Political Cartoon Gallery in London, is the first Shepard show bold enough to ignore the drawings he did for The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh.

For anyone who knows only these illustrations, Shepard's political cartoons will be a wonderful surprise. Admittedly, they're not terribly funny (how many Punch cartoons really were?), but they are beautifully drawn, and make some important points about the politics of the age, especially the British mindset during the Second World War. Shepard's wartime cartoons aren't at all satirical. They are sincere and patriotic - just about the most shocking things you can aspire to in our cynical and jaded age. Churchill, Stalin and Franco are all exquisitely rendered, but one of his strongest (and funniest) cartoons is of a Nazi goose goose-stepping into the Rhineland in 1936.

"Everyone hates being typecast, especially for something they don't consider their best work," says Dr Tim Benson, curator of the Political Cartoon Gallery, and the brains behind this exhibition. Yet any hope that Shepard might escape Milne's shadow seems futile. The Pooh drawings fetch as much as £50,000; in Benson's gallery, Shepard's political cartoons are priced at roughly £1,000. As long as Winnie-the-Pooh remains in print, Shepard will remain Milne's sidekick, even though it is Shepard's pictures that make Milne's words live and breathe.

Shepard was not the first artist to feel hard-done-by in this way. History is littered with creative types who have gone to their graves disgruntled that their fans preferred their lighter work. Hergé (Georges Remi) was always ambivalent about his own most famous creation. "I've fallen out of love with Tintin," he told his British translator Michael Turner. "I just can't bear to see him." At the peak of his powers, Hergé drew Tintin standing over him, wielding a cat-o'-nine-tails. When he tried to draw the character in later life, his hands were plagued with psychosomatic pain.

Arthur Conan Doyle grew so sick of Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off. "I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do toward pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much," he told a friend, "so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day." Conan Doyle turned his attention to historical novels, yet his readers were never quite so keen - and after eight years of public clamouring, he finally revived his great detective. The readers were quite right. As is often the case, they understood the work far better than its creator. Resurrected, Holmes solved his most celebrated case in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Today, Conan Doyle's historical novels are virtually forgotten, while the sleuth of Baker Street is very much alive.

Conan Doyle's reluctance to devote his time to detective fiction may seem like madness now, but at the time it was understandable. He was a preacher, a missionary and a field doctor in the Boer war; he persuaded the army to wear steel helmets, invented the naval life jacket, introduced skiing to Switzerland, played soccer and cricket for his country and bowled out W G Grace. The idea that he might be remembered for a throwaway serial in a popular magazine would have seemed absurd.

The dilemma is a common one. Artists strive to create memorable characters, but they hate creating icons that they can't control. The Holmes most of us know now is not the Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle's books, but of Basil Rathbone's films. At least Conan Doyle was dead by the time "Elementary, my dear Watson" (a phrase his Holmes never uttered) became his catchphrase. Anthony Burgess lived to see his most celebrated novel, A Clockwork Orange, eclipsed by Kubrick's film. "Someone affirmed that I did not exist: I was merely an invention of Stanley Kubrick," wrote Burgess in his autobiography, You've Had Your Time, of a debate he attended with Joseph Heller. "The newspaper report of the debate said that Joseph Heller and Stanley Kubrick were on the platform."

The fate of all these artists is perhaps best summed up by an old Scottish joke. A tourist couple arrive in a Highland village and enlist the services of a local guide. The man who shows them around is well informed, but a bit grumpy. "You see those houses?" he says. "I built all those houses. Do they call me Angus the housebuilder? You see those walls? I built all those walls. Do they call me Angus the wall builder? You see those bridges? I built all those. Do they call me Angus the bridge builder? I shag one sheep . . ."

Maybe Shepard's only hope of escaping Winnie-the-Pooh rests with Walt Disney, which bought the rights to Milne's books and replaced Shepard's unassuming British bear with a mawkish American model. Disney's Pooh, not his, is the one that many young people recall. So, as the films overtake Milne's books in the collective imagination, will Shepard finally become remembered for his political cartoons rather than his kindergarten drawings?

"The Man Who Hated Pooh!" is at the Political Cartoon Gallery, 32 Store Street, London WC1 (020 7580 1114) until 21 May

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