Unfinished Winnie-the-Pooh drawings by E. H. Shepard surface in London
Two previously unseen pencil drawings by English illustrator E. H. Shepard (1879–1976) have emerged through Peter Harrington Rare Books, offering a rare glimpse of how Winnie-the-Pooh first took shape on the page. The works, both made for A.A. Milne’s 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh, were never completed for publication and were not included in the final volume.
The drawings are titled “Climbing very cautiously up the stream” and “Pooh and Piglet Tracking Woozles.” In the first, Christopher Robin leads Pooh, Piglet, and Owl upstream in a brisk, lightly sketched composition that suggests Shepard working quickly through movement and character. The second is more restrained: Pooh and Piglet stand before an open, nearly empty landscape, a quiet image that leaves the imagined Woozles offstage.
Philip Errington, a specialist at Peter Harrington, said in a statement that the drawings are “extraordinarily rare” because they capture “the first moment of inspiration” and were never taken beyond the sketch stage. That unfinished quality is part of their appeal. Shepard’s process typically involved pencil drawing followed by graphite on the reverse, allowing the image to be transferred to board and finished in ink. These sheets have no graphite on the back.
Each drawing is priced at £9,000 ($12,200). Peter Harrington is also offering other Shepard Pooh-related works, including a 1928 drawing of Christopher Robin and Tigger with Eeyore for £30,000 ($40,700), and a 1928 preliminary drawing for Home Chat priced at £24,000 ($35,500).
The appearance of these works also points to the long afterlife of Shepard’s Pooh imagery in the market and in museums. Most of his Pooh illustrations were donated to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1969, and the collection was featured in the 2017 exhibition Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic. In 2018, a framed ink drawing of “The Original Map of the Hundred Acre Wood” sold at Sotheby’s London for £430,000 ($568,760).
Peter Harrington will bring a selection of Pooh drawings, including two of the earliest and least known images of the bear, to the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair later this month. For collectors, the appeal lies not only in rarity, but in the visible hesitation of the hand before a cultural icon was fixed in ink.
