John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London ed. by Julius Bryant, Susan Weber (review)

Now and then a book comes along that is a cultural event—John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London, edited by Julius Bryant and Susan Weber, is such a volume. John Lockwood Kipling, Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) (1837–1911), was an English sculptor, teacher, illustrator, museum director, curator of international exhibitions, journalist, founder and editor of The Journal of Indian Art and Industry, designer, architect, interior decorator, and so on. Underappreciated in the West, he remains a hero in Lahore, British India (present-day Pakistan). He preserved Indian arts and crafts without reducing them or simplifying varied historical, religious, and geographical art and architecture legacies within the country. As teacher at and later principal of the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) from 1865 to 1874, he articulated its mission “to cultivate as strenuously as possible those ideas and methods of design which are peculiarly national and characteristic and to superadd the careful and constant study of nature” (Kipling qtd. in Bryant and Weber 110). As principal of the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore and curator of the city’s museum from 1875 to 1893, he viewed native practices, rather than commercialism, as the right foundation for pedagogy. Concurrently, he located commissions and exhibiting opportunities for his students. Verbally memorialized most notably in Kim (1900–01), he was also Rudyard Kipling’s father.

Written to accompany the 2017 John Lockwood Kipling Exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, this essay volume builds on the work of many scholars and offers new, deeply researched assessments of Kipling’s variegated career. Kipling, who seemed destined for the Methodist ministry, was dazzled by his visit as a schoolboy to the 1851 Great Exhibition. He chose art, or it chose him. Leaving behind wealthier in-laws, who included brother-in-law Edward Burne-Jones, he spent most of his career in British India. He moved to Bombay with his pregnant wife, Alice, in 1865 and, eight years later after the birth of Rudyard and Alice and the death of a third child born prematurely, relocated to Lahore. He and his wife moved back to England in 1892 when he retired due to a weak heart.

This lavishly illustrated book features images from museum and library collections from London to Pittsburgh, and Brattleboro, Vermont to Glasgow. It supplements them with recent photographs of key venues. We see, for instance, Kipling’s Saint Paul’s memorial to John Paxton Norman, stabbed in India, or his and William Emerson’s Kesowjee Naik fountain and clock tower in today’s Mumbai. Memorably, in the book and at the exhibit, we see Kipling in a photograph of Godfrey Sykes’s mosaic panel over the original entrance of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). The panel honors the museum’s director, its architect, Sykes himself, and his assistant Kipling, among others. As Julius Bryant notes, the panel serves now as a moving London tribute to Kipling’s creative talent, vision, empathy, and integrity.

Rudyard Kipling destroyed most of his father’s private papers immediately after his death; we tend to remember the father as a curator or as his son’s sometime illustrator. While a few scholars have written significantly about John Lockwood Kipling’s contributions, such as Mahrukh Tarapor in her 1980 Victorian Studies article and Arthur R. Ankers in a 1988 book, there has been no full assessment of his career until now. The essays present John Lockwood Kipling’s career in the contexts of museum history, Indian art and culture at home and abroad, sculpture and ceramics, rivals and supporters, Anglo-Indian relations, exhibition history, and his family. Museum professionals and professors of history and art history, including Catherine Arbuthnott, Barbara Bryant, Peter H. Hoffenberg...