Illustration for Albrizzi’s Istoria, in which it was cut No. 136. From Hertz’s Biblia Sacra, vol. 1. Actual size. [Enlarged view.]

The cylinder press of Jackson’s design was finished in 1735 and paid for by the income from prolonged sieges of work for printing offices. But the overwork and resulting exhaustion laid him low; a serious illness followed and for several months he was close to death. When he eventually regained his health he found that his cuts for Baglioni and Pezzana had been copied and mutilated by an engraver at Ancona. This pirate was encouraged by the head of a large printing establishment newly founded in Venice, who thereupon offered Jackson work at greatly reduced prices. He refused the offer. With hack woodcutters now stealing both his designs and his manner of cutting, and working at a far lower rate than he could afford, he found that the market for his higher priced work had almost entirely disappeared. He still received occasional commissions, among others the title page to a translation of Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, printed by Piacentini in Venice in 1738. His splendid design, which shows considerable burin work, is at odds with the crudity of the remainder of the book. Inferior hands reproduced in woodcut outline Hubert Goltzius’ medallion portraits of Roman emperors, originally executed in chiaroscuro (see [p. 22]). Stimulated, no doubt, by the combination of chiaroscuro and antiquity, Jackson produced a portrait of Julius Caesar in four tones of brown after Egidius Sadeler’s engraving of a subsequently lost painting attributed to Titian. This was not the only time Jackson translated a line engraving and added chiaroscuro modeling of his own. He did not make line-for-line copies. Jackson was interested in broad effects even when leaning heavily on the delicate linear conventions of line engraving. The lines, therefore, are firm and

widely spaced, like photographically enlarged details of copper-plate work. Apparently Jackson felt that the addition of one or two tones from wood blocks would supply the intermediate tints and at the same time would prevent the line system from becoming obtrusive.

The decided influence of line engraving was probably the result of his association in 1731 with G. A. Faldoni in Venice. Influenced by Claude Mellan, this engraver made use of swelling parallel lines to create tonal gradations. Jackson had first become interested in this technical method through Ecman’s woodcuts after Callot, and once Faldoni had strengthened the attraction he found kindred influences in the engravings of Villamena and Alberti, particularly the former, from whom he also acquired design ideas he later put to use in his wallpapers. Jackson’s discovery that he could to some extent use copper-plate techniques was not a reversion to the style of the Parisian group of Le Clerc copyists. Jackson used the line system as a means for creating forms in conjunction with tones; the Parisian woodcutters used it to imitate the delicate quality of line engraving. He had a formal aesthetic end in view; their purpose was to render realistic details in a decorative framework.

With opportunities for book illustration gone, Jackson was in a difficult position. His novel chiaroscuro experiments had consumed valuable time and had lost him his standing as a steady worker for printers. Near destitution and scouting around for fresh applications of the woodcut, he decided to make prints for wallpaper on his new press. It was a logical step for Jackson, not only because he knew something of the process but also because he could make use of the chiaroscuro blocks already prepared. Late in 1737 or early in 1738 he had his first samples ready and sent them to Robert Dunbar in London, together with his conditions for carrying on the trade in Venice. Negotiations dragged, and Dunbar died before they could come to terms, but the idea of using his skill and his machine for turning out wallpaper continued to occupy his mind as a possibility. But, for the time, the undertaking had to be laid aside while Jackson looked for more immediate means of employment.

At this juncture Joseph Smith befriended him. A merchant of long standing in Venice, who became the British consul there in 1745, Smith was a bibliophile,

gem collector, and connoisseur of the arts. In spite of Walpole’s sneering reference to him as “the merchant of Venice,” it must be said that he was expert in his fields of interest. He had excellent taste. His fine collection of books was purchased by George III in 1765, and the small Rembrandt Descent from the Cross once in his possession is now in the National Gallery in London.

From Smith’s bronze statuette of Neptune, by Giovanni da Bologna, Jackson produced a chiaroscuro print in four blocks, in imitation, he asserted, of the prints of Andrea Andreani.[28] In suggesting the influence of this master, Jackson did not refer to his technique or style but to his subject: in 1584-1585 Andreani had produced a chiaroscuro series after other statues by Giovanni da Bologna (B. XII, VI, 1-4).