“John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London” is the kind of thoroughly researched, expertly installed, slightly daunting but ultimately rewarding exhibition in which the Bard Graduate Center specializes. Organized by Susan Weber, the director of the center, and Julius Bryant, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it is also typically groundbreaking. Its subject is one of 19th-century England’s notable polymaths, John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), father of the writer Rudyard Kipling. As an artistically talented teenager the elder Kipling was transfixed by the lavish displays of crafts from India he saw in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He devoted most of his life and energy as a draftsman, sculptor, designer, teacher, curator and administrator to documenting, preserving and promoting Indian crafts and craftsmen; leading schools in Mumbai and Lahore; and procuring commissions for his teachers and students. These included extravagant carved-wood interiors in the royal residences of Bagshot Park near Windsor Castle and Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight.

With furniture, drawings, photographs, textiles, videos and much else, this exhibition forms an immersive visual biography, a fascinating chapter of the British Arts and Crafts movement and a story of relatively benign colonialism. It begins with some of the Indian luxury goods that young Kipling saw in 1851 and ends with his post-retirement career as an illustrator of some of his son’s best-known books. Many of the loans here come from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which was created for material acquired from the Great Exhibition. Its story is also part of the Bard show and further detailed in the extraordinary catalog. No surprise, when he was just starting out, the elder Kipling helped design some of the museum’s interiors and decorations. (Through Jan. 7; 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan; bgc.bard.edu.)