the circle in which they were admired. To enumerate the great variety of these pictures would be a task.
Bewick adds that some of these popular woodcuts, although not the great majority, were very good. Since this was the main field for woodcutters, it is an interesting conjecture that Jackson might have been trained for this craft. As he matured, we can assume that he felt the urge to excel as a woodcutter and left the country to develop his potentialities.
It must be remembered that in painting and engraving England was far behind the continental countries, which could boast of centuries of celebrated masters. The medieval period persisted in England until the time of Henry VIII. Traditional religious subjects, so indispensable to European art, were thereafter generally proscribed. There was no fondness as yet for themes of classical mythology, and the new and developing national tradition in painting had to form itself on the only remaining field of pictorial expression, portraiture. Standards of style were set by foreign artists who were lured to England to record its prominent personages in a fitting manner. Beside such masters as Holbein, Zuccaro, Moro, Geeraerts, Van Dyck, Mytens, Lely, Kneller, Zoffany, and Van Loo, among others, native painters seemed crude and provincial. The list of foreign artists other than portraitists who visited England before 1750 for varying periods is also impressive.
If good native painters were rare in the first decades of the 18th century, good engravers or woodcutters were even rarer. Hogarth, whose earliest prints were produced in the 1720’s, received his training from a silversmith.
Jackson’s next move was toward the Continent.
[ Paris: Perfection of a Craft]
Jackson arrived in Paris in 1725, his age 24 if we accept 1701 as his birth date. Here flourished a brilliant community of artists, craftsmen, dealers, and connoisseurs; woodcutting, etching, and line engraving were highly developed and the printing offices made extensive use of woodcuts for decoration and illustration. The
woodcut tradition mimicked line engraving and was confined chiefly to tiny blocks wrought with the utmost delicacy. The main influence came from the 17th century—in particular from the etchings and line engravings of Sébastien Le Clerc and from the etchings of Jacques Callot, whose simple system of swelling parallel lines, with occasional cross-hatchings, was adopted by both line engravers and woodcutters.
Le Clerc, whose style was influenced by Callot, had produced a vast number of illustrations involving subjects of almost every type; his designs, therefore, were ready-made for publishers who wanted good but low-priced illustrations. Woodcutters copied his engravings shamelessly, line for line. The overblown high Baroque style in ornament, swag, and cartouche was also drawn upon as a source for decorative cuts. In an attempt to imitate the full tonal scale of engraving, the woodcutters used heavier lines in the foreground to detach the main figures from the background, which was made up of more delicate lines. Background lines were often narrowed further by scraping down their edges, an operation that caused them to merge imperceptibly into the white paper. In this way, although the natural vigor of the woodcut suffered, an effect of space and distance was achieved. Because of the small scale this technique was difficult, especially when cross-hatching was added, and special knives as well as a phenomenal deftness were needed to work out these bits of jewelry on the plank grain of pear, cherry, box, and serviceberry wood.
Jackson’s initial impression of the state of woodcutting in France is described in the Enquiry (p. 27):