John Lockwood Kipling

John Lockwood Kipling
Portrait of J. Lockwood Kipling, by Hollinger.
Born	(1837-07-06)6 July 1837 Pickering, North Yorkshire, England
Died	26 January 1911(1911-01-26) (aged 73) Tisbury, Wiltshire, England
Occupation	Art teacher, illustrator, museum curator

John Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E. (6 July 1837 – 26 January 1911), was an English art teacher, illustrator, and museum curator who spent most of his career in British India. He was the father of the author Rudyard Kipling.

Lockwood Kipling was born in Pickering, North Yorkshire, the son of Frances (Lockwood) and Reverend Joseph Kipling, and was educated at Woodhouse Grove School, a Methodist boarding school. He met his wife Alice MacDonald while working in Burslem, Staffordshire, where his designs can still be seen on the façade of the Wedgwood Institute.

Alice was the daughter of a Methodist minister, the Reverend George Browne Macdonald. Kipling married in 1865 and moved with his wife to India, where he had been appointed as a professor of architectural sculpture in the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), and later became its principal.

Their son was born soon after, in December 1865, and was christened Rudyard after Rudyard, Staffordshire, the place where his parents had first met; their daughter Alice Kipling was born in 1868. In 1870-1872 Kipling was commissioned by the government to tour the Punjab, North-West Frontier and Kashmir and make a series of sketches of Indian craftsmen as well as various sights and antiquities in these regions. Today several of these sketches are at the Victoria and Albert Museum whilst others were printed in a number of books.

In 1875, Kipling was appointed the Principal of Mayo School of Arts, Lahore, British India (present day National College of Arts, Pakistan) and also became curator of the old original Lahore Museum which figured as the Wonder House or Ajaib Ghar in Kim, not to be confused with the present one. He retired back to England in 1893.