Warren W. Sheppard

Grand Canal, Venice

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Warren Sheppard was born on April 10, 1858 in Greenwich, New Jersey along the Delaware River. This town was known as a seaport and shipbuilding center since the Colonial days. Sheppard’s father was a lumber ship captain and often took his son on trips along the river where the young boy was exposed to the sea and its ways. He studied painting under Mauritz Frederik de Haas (1832-1895), but received his formal artistic training at the Cooper Union, one of the nation's oldest institutions of higher learning, dedicated exclusively to preparing students for the professions of art and architecture. Sheppard was the essence and the personification of the Renaissance Man. He was first and foremost an artist, but he was also a teacher; a yacht designer as well as a yachtsman; and a navigator as well as the author of two books on navigation entitled, Practical Navigation and A Tale of the Sea which he also illustrated. Because Sheppard was intimately acquainted with the sea and its physicality coupled with his detailed knowledge of the design of the ships and their riggings, he was able to secure a number of commissions for illustrations in several well-known periodicals of the time such as the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Sun.