A relative of the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, Keith Shackleton spent much of his own career painting precisely the icescapes his famous forebear had once struggled to survive, becoming one of the twentieth century's foremost painters of Antarctica and the Arctic. Born in 1923, he attended Oundle School, where a lifelong friendship with the future conservationist and fellow painter Peter Scott, son of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, took root, and served in the RAF during the Second World War before joining his family's aviation business as a pilot and salesman.
Shackleton painted in his spare time until 1960, when he became a full-time artist, and from 1969 made repeated voyages aboard the MS Lindblad Explorer to the Arctic, Antarctic, South Atlantic and South Pacific, developing an unrivalled first-hand familiarity with polar seas, ice and the seabirds that populate his finest and best-loved paintings. He was a founder member and later president of the Society of Wildlife Artists, president of the Royal Society of Marine Artists, and chairman of the Artists' League of Great Britain, and in 1986 became the first British artist honoured as "Master Artist" by America's Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum. Alongside painting, Shackleton pursued a genuinely wide-ranging public career: he helped Peter Scott found the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, becoming its vice-president, co-presented the long-running BBC children's programme Animal Magic with Johnny Morris through the 1960s, and later hosted his own series, Animals in Action. He was appointed MBE for services to wildlife conservation in 2012, and died in 2015.
The painting by Shackleton held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of fulmars, exemplifies the closely observed seabird subjects for which he remained best known throughout a career that combined genuine artistic distinction with public advocacy for the polar wildernesses he painted so often and so knowledgeably.