John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911) was born in Pickering, Yorkshire. His interest in art and design was aroused by a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, a huge display of Britain’s trading prowess in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in London. Kipling later became involved in the decoration of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is depicted in a relief panel on the pediment of the Museum’s lecture theatre.

At the end of 1864, he was appointed Architectural Sculptor, one of three new posts for artist–craftsmen at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. He later became its principal. In the following March he was married and a few weeks later set off for a new life in India. In December 1865 his first son was born and christened Rudyard after the place in Staffordshire where his parents had first met. As well as teaching, Kipling made decorative designs for buildings in Bombay and even designed the uniforms and decorations for Lord Lytton’s Imperial Assemblage of 1877, at which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. In 1875 he was appointed head of the new Mayo College of Arts in Lahore, in present-day north-east Pakistan, where he promoted traditional Indian crafts, which had been declining in the face of cheap European imports.

In 1870 Kipling had been commissioned by the British Government to tour the north-west provinces and make a series of sketches of Indian artisans. This one shows a man working at a silk loom at Agra in northern India.