Biography
Enquire about this picture£600 Presentation: Framed
Extensively inscribed with printing instructions
Pen and ink on board prepared with gesso
9-1/2 × 7-7/8 in. (24 × 20 cm)
Provenance: Christine Sheppard, the artist’s daughter .
Literature: ‘Warneford,VC’, in Lilliput, March 1957, pp. 20–7.
This illustration, from 1957, was commissioned by Lilliput, a small-format British monthly magazine of humour , short stories, photographs and the arts, founded in 1937 by the photojournalist Stefan Lorant.The illustration records an important event in the FirstWorldWar , when on 31 May 1915, the LZ-38
became the first Zeppelin to bomb London: ‘we can still feel a macabre horror over the picture of a pencil-slim object slow-moving in the night-dark, licked by searchlights, seemingly immune to gunfire, slipping incredible death from its belly before gliding unharmed away’ (Lilliput).
Raymond Sheppard served with the Royal Air Force photographic section
from 1939–45.