John Lockwood Kipling was born in 1837 in Pickering, Yorkshire, the son of a Methodist minister. His interest in art and design was aroused by a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and he was taken on as an apprentice by Pinder, Bourne & Co., earthenware manufacturers of Burslem in Staffordshire, while concurrently studying at Stoke and Fenton School of Art. He then joined the Department of Science and Art in South Kensington and became involved in the decoration of the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the end of 1864, Kipling 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 married Alice Macdonald, the sister-in-law of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and on 12 April they set off for their new life in India. In December 1865 their first son was born and christened Rudyard after the place in Staffordshire where his parents had first met. As well as teaching, Lockwood Kipling made decorative designs for buildings in Bombay and 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, where he promoted traditional Indian crafts, which had been declining in the face of cheap European imports. He conjointly became Curator of the Central Museum of Lahore (originally the Industrial Art Museum of the Panjab). In 1886 he was appointed a C.I.E., and in 1893 he retired from the Indian Education Department. Lockwood Kipling eventually came back to England and settled in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where he died in 1911. Most of the V&A's Kipling drawings date from 1870, but this one was completed about fifteen years later.