Book illustrations constitute the largest body of artistic output clearly and solely attributed to Lockwood Kipling's name.... Kipling's drawing skills, and lifelong propensity to observe and record what he saw, made him a natural illustrator. — Elizabeth James 361.

Before Kipling left India in 1893, he had already illustrated educational books, publications for the Mayo School in Lahore of which he was then principal, and Edward Emerson Oliver's Across the Border, or Pâthan and Biloch for Chapman & Hall (1890). He had also illustrated his own Beast and Man in India (1891), and had contributed drawings of craftsmen to the South Kensington Museum's long series, Portfolio of Indian Art (1881 onwards). This really was a large body of work, with over eighty illustrations of his own in Beast and Man alone. After retiring and returning to England, he spent much of his time designing covers and providing illustrations for his son's fiction, although he by no means confined himself to this. One of his later projects, for instance, was to illustrate Flora Annie Steel's Tales of the Punjab (1894), in which his various types of illustration, including decorated initial letters, and head- and end-pieces, are perhaps most fully integrated. But Elizabeth James is particularly impressed by the ten highly original illustrations based on sculptured reliefs, reproduced photographically, that he prepared for Rudyard's Kim (1901) — "a completely new method of enhancing literary texts" (382). — Jacqueline Banerjee

Biography

John Lockwood Kipling's Other Works

Illustrations for Beast and Man in India (a selection)

Illustrations for Tales of the Punjab (a selection)

Illustrations for Kim

Bibliography

Bryant, Julius, and Susan Weber, eds. John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London. New York: Bard Graduate Centre Gallery; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.

James, Elizabeth. "Kipling and Book Illustration. In Bryant and Weber. 361-399.

Kemp, Sandra. "My Bread and Butter: Kipling's Journalism." In Bryant and Weber. 301-27.

Kipling, John Lockwood. Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People. London: Macmillan, 1891. Internet Archive. Contributed by the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. Web. 20 January 2017.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. New York: Doubleday, 1901. Internet Archive. Contributed by the New York Public Library. Web. 20 January 2017.

Steel, Flora Annie Webster. Tales of the Punjab: Told by the People. London: Macmillan, 1917. Internet Archive. Contributed by the New York Public Library. Web. 20 January 2017.


Created 21 January 2017