Toomai of the Elephants
John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
circa 1897
Materials
Oak, Terracotta
Measurements
690 x 470 mm
Place of origin
Tisbury
Order this imageCollection
Bateman's, East Sussex
NT 761585
Caption
John Lockwood Kipling's sculptural relief of Toomai of the Elephants is based upon the short story by his son Rudyard about a young elephant-handler. The huge elephant that fills this relief, foreshortened at a three-quarter angle, is a virtuoso demonstration of Kipling’s ability to create the illusion of sculptural volume on an almost flat surface. In June 1895 Kipling and his wife Alice moved into the Gables, a house just outside Tisbury in Wiltshire. There he had a garden studio where he modelled more than sixty bas-reliefs, of which this is one.
Summary
White plaster relief modeled by John Lockwood Kipling for publication as an illustration of his son Rudyard's short story 'Toomai and the elephants'. Oak framed.
Full description
Somehow, the history of British sculpture has overlooked John Lockwood Kipling. His professional background was similar to that of the great neoclassical sculptors John Bacon and John Flaxman, for he spent the start of his career as a designer and modeller for a leading ceramics manufacturer. He followed a clear professional trajectory, from the Potteries School of Art, Stoke-on Trent, to the London studio of the leading architectural sculpture John Birnie Philip. He then joined the team at the South Kensington Museum, making cast architectural decoration for its new buildings. In India he made architectural sculpture, church monuments and busts. What sets Kipling apart from Bacon and Flaxman is his lack of training at the Royal Academy Schools and his absorption instead of the ‘South Kensington’ ethos that lies behind the Arts and Crafts Movement. He did not produce ‘fine art’ sculpture of poetical and historical subjects in the academic tradition for galleries, the goal to which so many of his contemporaries aspired. His most substantial body of work is more than sixty relief sculptures, most made for photographic reproduction as book illustrations. He also modelled medal sand decorated small luxury objects with the dexterity of a goldsmith. Among fellow pioneers of the Arts and Crafts movement, he is unusual in his earl response to the sculptures and casts acquired by the South Kensington Museum and in his enthusiasm for contemporary French sculpture – long before Jules Dalou came to teach in the South Kensington schools in 1871. Kipling displayed great dexterity at relief modelling as evident in the plaster relief of Toomai of the Elephants. In such virtuoso modelling Kipling may be recalling the fine Italian Renaissance bas-relief sculptures, which arrived in the South Kensington Museum while he worked there. In the year he started in South Kensington, 1861, the museum purchased a masterpiece of bas-relief sculpture, Donatello’s ‘The Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter’ of 1428-30 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 7629-1861). The following year the curator J.C. Robinson illustrated it in the museum’s first catalogue, which was devoted to Italian Renaissance sculpture. There were also many reliefs in the cast collection. The V&A’s present Cast Courts opened in 1873, but before he left for Bombay in 1865, Kipling, as an architectural sculptor at the museum, could have studied several casts on display in the North Court. On balance, Kipling’s visual memory of South Kensington’s collections seems to have been stronger than his interest in Indian sculpture in Bombay and Lahore where he lived and worked from 1865-1893. These sources can also be traced in the many bas-reliefs Kipling modelled in Tisbury for publication as book illustrations. In his garden studio, a thatched corrugated-iron shed known as ‘the Dufter’ and which Rudyard called the ‘tin tabernacle’, he modelled more than sixty such sculptures. Rudyard gave away many of them as gifts and one was sold in a sale, but fifteen survive at Bateman’s, Rudyard’s home. The arrival of Donatello’s relief sculptures in the South Kensington Museum afforded opportunities to study the Renaissance master’s extraordinary range, from high relief down to the lightest outlines (known as rilievo schiacciato, or ‘squashed relief’). The same effect is especially evident in Kipling’s relief, for The Jungle Book, showing Mowgli with wolves and leopards (NT 761561) and his relief, for Kim, ‘On the Road’ (NT 761582). The huge beast that fills the present relief, Toomai of the Elephants, foreshortened at a three-quarter angle, is a virtuoso demonstration of his ability to create the illusion of sculptural volume on an almost flat surface. Text adapted from Julius Bryant, 'Kipling as a Sculptor' in 'John Lockwood Kipling: Art & Crafts in the Punjab and London’, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York and Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 81 - 105.
Makers and roles
John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), sculptor
Exhibition history
Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, 2017 - 2018
References
John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London (Ed.Julius Bryant and Susan Weber) published in conjunction with the exhibition, the Victoria & Albert Museum, 14 Jan - 2 Apr 2017; Bard Graduate Center, New York: 15 Sept 2017 - 7 Jan 2018., pp. 81-105