An artist with a passion for Indian crafts
Une passionnante exposition à Londres.
En France, on connait surtout le fils, Rudyard, et son roman Le livre de la jungle. En Grande-Bretagne, on connaît un peu mieux le père, John Lockwood Kipling, un artiste, collectionneur et grand amoureux des Indes. A Londres, au Victoria & Albert Museum, sa collection et ses oeuvres personnelles sont exposées jusqu’au 2 avril et permettent de découvrir le parcours d’un homme remarquable.
If the teenage son of a Methodist preacher had not visited the Great Exhibition in 1851, The Jungle Book and other beloved works of Rudyard Kipling would probably never have been created. The awe-struck visitor was not the author but his father, John Lockwood Kipling, whose life was changed forever by the Indian treasures he saw on display at Crystal Palace, and whose passion for India profoundly influenced his son.
2. The first exhibition celebrating Lockwood, an artist, teacher, and promoter of traditional Indian arts and crafts, little known in Britain but still revered in his adopted home in India, takes place at the V&A museum in London.
3. Some of his earliest work, after he trained in the Potteries in Staffordshire as a painter and designer, forms part of the original terracotta ornament on the museum building – work he created before he moved first to Bombay then to Lahore in modern Pakistan, where he became head of the art colleges and museums.
BORN AND RAISED
4. Lockwood’s children were born in India and grew up surrounded by the works of the Indian art he had collected, the artists he trained and promoted, the stories he told, and the images he recorded of traditional craft workers.
5. “If you mention the name Kipling in Lahore they assume it’s Lockwood, not the Jungle Book one,” said the V&A curator Julius Bryant. “He is still a hero there. He is unquestionably the William Morris of India. Only instead of staying home and whining about the death of traditional arts and crafts, he went out there and did something about preserving them.”
6. Many of the paintings, ceramics, carvings and furniture are within the vast V&A collection – including some of the objects displayed at Crystal Palace which so thrilled the 13-yearold Lockwood. But they have not been on display for most of the last century. “These things were not lost, but they have been rescued from deep storage, and displayed in a totally new context,” Bryant said. “We’re tackling the Empire head on. Seventy years after it ended with Indian independence in 1947 it really is time to get to grips with it.”