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James Affleck Shepherd (1876-1946)

James Affleck Shepard (1876-1946)

James Affleck Shepherd was born in London on 29 November 1867, the son of a cigar importer. He was educated at various public schools, but received no formal art training. Instead, he worked for three years on the magazine Moonshine, under the caricaturist Alfred Bryan (1890-93), and made a close study of animal life at the Zoological Gardens; this resulted in his becoming a master draughtsman of anthropomorphic art as marked by his fellowship of the Zoological Society. He made his name with ‘Zig-Zags’, a series of social caricatures for the Strand magazine (1892) which were later made into animated cartoons by Philips Philm Phables (1919). He went on to contribute to Punch (from 1893), and to illustrate books (from 1895), and was awarded a gold medal at the International Exhibition of Humour in Rivoli, Italy (1911). Working into the nineteen-thirties, he died on 11 May 1946.