E H Shepard Archive
Welcome to the website of the E.H. Shepard Archive at the University of Surrey ! Please use the links at left to navigate around the site.
About Archives
Archives are records selected for indefinite (and ideally permanent) preservation because of their evidentiary or historic value. They provide information (about a person or organisation's activities, history, and changes) or evidence (of actions, policies, and decisions). What is – and is not – in an archive also sheds light on wider historical topics by providing evidence of what society deemed important – or trivial – in the past. Archival records can be in any format.
About the E. H. Shepard Archive
Ernest Howard Shepard had life-long links to Surrey, and Guildford in particular, which led him to donate the bulk of his personal papers to the University of Surrey in 1974; Vice-Chancellor D.M.A. Leggett accepted them during a small ceremony on 19 April. After an internal exhibition, the papers were housed in the university library for use by research students, but were not catalogued. In the 1990's, the collection was rediscovered and put into the care of Arthur Chandler, who was then in charge of the university archive. Mr. Chandler mounted a number of exhibitions of Shepard's artwork, notably at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2000 and a touring exhibition in Japan in the early 2000's. This work raised the profile of the archive – and the university – considerably. However, the collection was not systematically organised and did not have a publicly-available catalogue, causing difficulty for researchers.
In late 2007, project funding allowed the university to hire an archivist to sort, organise, and catalogue Mr. Shepard's papers to international archival standards. Placing the catalogue on the Internet means that, for the first time in 30 years, scholars, artists, and friends-of-Pooh will be able to use this internationally important collection effectively and easily.
