Francis Bernard Shields, painter, printmaker, and illustrator, was born in New York City in 1908. He studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League with Ivan Olinsky, Charles Webster Hawthorne, and Kimon Nicholaides.

Shields worked on the WPA Art Federal Art Project, New York City between 1935 and 1943 and created both black and white and color lithographs. He also was an illustrator and created illustrations for A Collection of Animal Story Masterpieces in 1939 and Parade of Fairy Tales: Famous Tales Selected from the Folk Lore of the World in 1945. He also contributed to Natural History and Boy’s Life magazines.

Shields lived in Freeport, New York and was a member of the Freeport Art Guild. His work was included in exhibitions at the University of Kansas (1939), the Library of Congress (1941), the Freeport Memorial Library (between 1941 and 1945), the Weyhe Gallery and the WPA Gallery in New York, the Stamford Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Nassau Art League. A solo exhibition of his work was mounted at the Freeport Memorial Library in 1939.

The work of Francis B. Shields is represented in the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art. and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Francis B. Shields died in Saint Augustine, Florida in 1990.