Warren W. Sheppard was born in Greenwich, New Jersey, and studied painting under Mauritz Frederik de Haas (1832 1895) in New York. A navigator of racing yachts that he also designed, he wrote and illustrated two books, Practical Navigation and A Tale of the Sea. Sheppard lived in Brooklyn and summered in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, and on the Isles of Shoals, off New Hampshire. His numerous paintings of Venice suggest that he must have traveled to Italy in the 1890s. Sheppard exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1874 to 1881, the National Academy of Design in New York from 1880 to 1899, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and the Denver Exposition in 1884, where he won a gold medal. His works are in the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Toledo Art Museum, the Public Library in Springfield, Massachusetts, the India House in New York, Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.