John Buckland-Wright was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on December 3, 1897. His father died when he was young and, by 1908 his mother and he had move to England. He studied architecture at Clifton and Oxford but in 1924 he gave up an offer of an architectural partnership to become an artist. Buckland-Wright made the fortunate decision to settle in Brussels at the home of his mother and stepfather as Belgium in the mid 1920s where assembled one of the most vibrant artistic communities in Europe.

Buckland-Wright moved to Paris in 1929 and began to work with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 and was one of the acting directors when Hayter was unavailable. He returned to London in 1939 where he taught at Camberwell and, after 1952, the Slade School.

He worked primarily as a printmaker, illustrating numerous private press books, some of an erotic nature. Buckland-Wright’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum Meermanno in The Hague, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery. The British Museum was bequeathed a large collection of his work after his untimely death on September 27, 1954.