Born in Owings Mill, Md., Joseph Sheppard attended the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1946-52 before traveling to Florence, Italy in 1957 where he worked and trained through a Guggenheim Traveling Fellowship award. His work was shown at the Peale Museum when that historic site in Baltimore was still open to the public. Sheppard has won international acclaim and his work is part of a number of permanent collections nationwide and in Italy. Sheppard divides his time between Maryland and the region of Tuscany in Italy in a town called Pietrasanta, which is home to sculptors, quarries and bronze foundries. Joseph Sheppard works within a realist tradition that recalls the style of the Renaissance masters. Sheppard has written his credo as follows: "I believe that technical skill is still an important element in art. I believe that there is no object to non-objective, that minimal is less, that junk sculpture is junk and form in painting relates to the illusion of three dimensions. My art is based on the return to those standards which demand the knowledge of composition, perspective, color, three dimensional form, draftsmanship and anatomy." (Sheppard, Joseph Sheppard: 50 Years of Art, Arti Grafiche Giorgi & Gambi, Firenze, Italy, 2001, p. 5). He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art when Baltimore was becoming a center for realism in art due to the appointment of Jacques Maroger, who was encouraged to come to the U.S. from Paris by patron Alice Warder Garrett, mistress of the historic Evergreen House. Maroger arrived in 1939 in New York City, where he taught at the Art Students League, then was brought to Baltimore in 1940 by Alice Garrett to meet president of MICA, Hans Schuler, Sr. Soon thereafter, Maroger begin teaching there. Joseph Sheppard began studying and painting under Maroger in the late 1940s, and never painted abstractly again. Key influences on Sheppard during this time included a focus on draftsmanship, the human figure as subject and the principles of classical art, which were all signs of his allegiance to Maroger's teaching. The Baltimore Realist group grew to include Reginald Marsh, one of America's great genre painters. Curator Cindy Kelly wrote, "Marsh's social realism led Sheppard to realize the value of combining the human figure within scenes of Baltimore urban life, for which he became so well known soon thereafter." (Kelly, Joseph Sheppard: 50 Years of Art, p. 8) Sheppard's earliest subject matter included life in the black ghettos and strip joints along Baltimore's famous Block. Even as a student, Sheppard sold work, and by 1957, only five years after graduating from MICA, he had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for study a year abroad in Paris and Italy and had one-man shows in Paris, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Despite such successes and popularity in Baltimore, the "Six Realists" opened a gallery in protest of being excluded from The Baltimore Museum of Art regional exhibition; 2,000 people attended the protest show. Sheppard has created a significant body of work in the diverse forms of oil paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings but is perhaps best known as a painter. His work portrays subject matter ranging from portraits of President George Herbert Walker Bush which hangs in Bush Library in Houston, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski and Maryland Mayor William Donald Schaefer to still-lifes and genre paintings. Specific Maryland-related scenes depict Monroe Street in Baltimore at the Coliseum (The Fighter), Martick's, a bar in Baltimore that was a speakeasy in Baltimore during Prohibition and Football (2001), which depicts the Ravens football team in the middle of a play. Sheppard spoke about his being an avid football fan in the late 1950s and early 60s when football and the Baltimore Colts were extremely popular among Baltimoreans. The composition of the work was based on a Rubens copy of da Vinci's missing drawing for a huge battle scene mural in which da Vinci placed the viewer in the middle of the battlefield. Sheppard wrote, "...thousands of miles from Baltimore and the NFL, I did a finished drawing that would later become the painting Football." Sheppard's murals decorate the walls of a number of Maryland institutions, including the Baltimore Police Department (1975) and the Peabody Court Hotel (1987). In Chicago, he completed seven murals at the Palmer House Hotel (1989). He has also created bronze sculptures, including Baltimore's Holocaust Memorial (1988), which consists of a 15-foot sculpture, and a life-size sculpture of St. Francis of Assisi at St. Joseph's Hospital (1992) in Baltimore. Joseph Sheppard's work is in the collections, among others, of the Archdiocese of Baltimore (Maryland); Butler Institute of American Art,Youngstown, Ohio; the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, Davenport, Iowa; the Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; the Columbus Museum of Fine Arts, Ohio; the Westmoreland Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, Virginia; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Bookgreen Gardens Museum of American Sculpture, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina; Fine Arts Museum of the South, Mobile, Alabama; New Britain Museum of Art, Connecticut; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Malcolm Forbes Collection, New York, New York; Maryland State House; University of Maryland University College; and the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland. Internationally, his work is represented in the Musco Dei Bozzetti Di Pietrasanta in Italy. Throughout his long career, Sheppard has also been an instructor in anatomical drawing, and produced a number of books about drawing the human figure, rendering color and texture and a guide for still life compositions.