3/10/2023 0 Comments David the shepherdMy life was in ruins.” After a brief period as a hotel receptionist on the Kenyan coast, he returned to the UK, and the Slade’s disheartening advice, before he met by chance a jobbing artist named Robin Goodwin, who took Shepherd on as an assistant at his studio in Chelsea, west London, where the bread and butter came from painting portraits and marine subjects.ĭuring this three-year period, Shepherd participated in the annual exhibition on the railings of the Victoria Embankment, “a wonderful shop window”, as he put it. “I knocked on the door of the head game warden in Nairobi and said, ‘I’m here, can I be a game warden?’ I was told I wasn’t wanted. He left at the earliest opportunity and, funded by his father, travelled to Kenya to become a game warden. “The game was compulsory at school and I was terrified of it,” Shepherd later said. They sent the boy to Stowe school, in Buckinghamshire, money not well spent since not only did he underachieve scholastically but he also failed to acquire a taste for playing rugby. Before he embarked on this, however, he put his artistic ambition and love of African wildlife together, to create the singular success by which he is known.ĭavid was born in Hendon, north London, the son of Raymond Shepherd, an advertising man, and Margaret (nee Williamson), a housewife. His second choice was to work on the buses. As well as his failure to enter art school, he failed to make the grade in his first choice of career, as a game warden in Africa. He liked to say, with the false modesty that is permitted to great successes, that his career was a series of disasters. His artistic ambition and love of African wildlife were a formula for success The charity campaigns to protect endangered species, and combat poaching and its trade.Ī Very Wise Old Elephant, by Shepherd. Certainly, he became immensely rich and helped to raise more than £8m for his other great passion – wildlife conservation – initially through donating painting sales proceeds to charities such as the World Wildlife Fund, and latterly through the efforts of the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation, set up in 1984. Shepherd was, some said, Britain’s Tretchikoff, with Wise Old Elephant his Chinese Girl, and this was intended as a compliment. ![]() A picture of this beast, alone or with its fellows, might be called The Men of Etosha, or Dusty Evening, or Elephant Heaven, or even, as in his bestseller, Wise Old Elephant. Instead, Shepherd, the artist and conservationist, who has died aged 86, took to painting meticulous pictures of railway engines, aircraft and – the real breakthrough – wildlife, especially his trademark African elephant bull, facing the viewer head-on with ears spread wide. The Slade did him the biggest favour of his life by telling him that he had no talent for art. Fresh out of school, with no scholastic achievements to recommend him, David Shepherd applied for a place at the Slade School of Art in London.
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