The topographical artist Thomas Hosmer Shepherd is one of the best represented artists in the Museum of London’s collection, which includes over 100 of his drawings and watercolours and over 500 prints. Most of his work was produced as illustrations to topographical publications, almost all depicting London.
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd belonged to an artistic family. His father George Shepherd was a watchcase maker, and his elder brother George Sidney Shepherd (1784-1862) was also a topographical artist. His two sons – Frederick Napoleon (1819–1878) and Valentine Claude (1835/6-1888) – would also become artists.
Nothing is known of George and Thomas Hosmer’s artistic training, although there is a reference to a Mr Shepherd at Dr Cox Macro’s sketching academy in 1806. All of the known-work of the two brothers is topographical, and much of it centred on the Islington area of London where they lived. It is likely that they were largely self-taught by drawing on-the-spot and perhaps copying engravings.
His earliest known work is a view of East India House, drawn in 1809, when he was sixteen, for Rudolph Ackermann’s ‘Repository of the Arts’. Shepherd’s breakthrough came in 1826 with a commission to illustrate Metropolitan Improvements, a book of ‘engravings of the new buildings, improvements, &c.’ built in London during the Regency of George IV, with descriptive texts by the architect James Elmes. The Museum of London has twenty-two of the original designs as well as several sets of prints. Also in the collection are fifty-eight of the designs for the follow-up, London in the Nineteenth Century (1829-31), for which Shepherd also wrote the texts. This formed a companion to Metropolitan Improvements, with illustrations of the ancient buildings in the city sitting alongside more modern structures. The images are populated with the bustle of everyday city life comprising all classes of people at work and play, as well as markets, deliveries, street events, vehicles, horses and dogs. In fact a black dog or two, often prancing about under the feet of people and horses, serves as a kind of signature in the majority of Shepherd’s works.
Other London publications for which Shepherd provided the illustrations are: Charles Frederick Partington’s Natural History and Views of London (1835), Joseph Mead’s London Interiors (1841), Charles Knight’s London (1841–4), Ernest Gambart’s London in Miniature (1854), and Mighty London (1855), as well as images for the Illustrated London News.
Shepherd’s designs for illustration are functional affairs, usually drawn in pen and sepia wash about the size of the intended engravings, providing an easy prototype of line and tone for the engraver to follow. These were worked up from on-the-spot pencil sketches, many of which are at the London Metropolitan Archives. It is therefore possible to follow Shepherd’s method of observing, recording, and elaborating his subjects from sketch to print. The Museum of London also holds some of Shepherd’s larger and more colourful presentation watercolours, many of which were commissioned by Frederick Crace and other antiquarian and topographical collectors. Among these are a striking set of watercolours of the Clerkenwell House of Correction, made shortly before it was demolished, and a series of alms houses and various other buildings and streets in London.
Although Shepherd is principally valued for the topographical and architectural detail and accuracy of his works – making them useful historical documents that are frequently reproduced in history books – they are also notable for the charm and humanity of their figurative elements. Shepherd presents London in the first half of the nineteenth century as a bustling commercial metropolis in which the old and new sit side-by-side and all classes of society intermingle harmoniously.