IF JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING IS REMEMBERED TODAY, IT IS PRIMARILY AS the illustrator of his son's books. Rudyard Kipling, in fact, throughout his long life, remembered his father as "a mine of knowledge and help, ... a humorous, tolerant, and expert fellow-craftsman," and above all as "a teacher of teachers."1 The senior Kipling - artist, teacher, scholar, and author of Beast and Man in India (1891) - spent most of his professional career in India, from 1865 to 1874 as a young instructor at the Bombay School of Art (the scene of Rudyard's childhood, "a marvellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played" [Something of Myself, pp. 8-9]), and between 1875 and 1893 as principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and curator of the city's famous museum, immortalized in Kim.

  • 1. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 34, 107.
Figure 3. "Gold Embroidery." Sketch by J. L. Kipling
Figure 3. "Gold Embroidery." Sketch by J. L. Kipling © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Figure 5. Woodcarving Workshop at the Mayo School, ca. 1907.
Figure 5. Woodcarving Workshop at the Mayo School, ca. 1907. © The Royal Commonwealth Society, London