Bedford Street, February 10, 1755
We do not know the results of this appeal. In any case Jackson seems to have faded out as an artist. Little is known of his subsequent career up to the time more than twenty years later, when Bewick mentions meeting him in advanced age. In 1761 he made a drawing of Salisbury Cathedral for Edward Eaton, “bookseller at Sarum,” for a line engraving dedicated by Eaton to the Lord Bishop of Winchester. This large view included figures in the foreground in an attempt to give animation to the scene. Unfortunately the engraver, John Fougeron, was little more than an amateur. His execution was feeble and mechanical: Jackson’s drawing suffered so badly that its quality cannot be determined. This print was copied on a smaller scale in a steel engraving by J. B. Swaine, published by J. B. Nichols & Son in 1843, but it was hardly an improvement.
Bewick’s recollections of Jackson, written about forty years after their meeting in Newcastle, imply that Jackson stayed in that city for a period. The Town Clerk’s Office, however, has no record of his residence. The following passage from Bewick’s Memoir is the last evidence[42] bearing on Jackson:
Several impressions from duplicate or triplicate blocks, printed in this way, of a very large size, were also given to me, as well as a drawing of the press from
which they were printed, many years ago, by Jean Baptiste Jackson, who had been patronised by the King of France; but, whether these prints had been done with the design of embellishing the walls of houses in that country, I know not. They had been taken from paintings of eminent old masters, and were mostly Scripture pieces. They were well drawn, and perhaps correctly copied from the originals, yet in my opinion none of them looked well. Jackson left Newcastle quite enfeebled with age, and, it was said, ended his days in an asylum, under the protecting care of Sir Gilbert Elliot, Bart., at some place on the border near the Teviot, or on Tweedside.
If Bewick was correct in reporting that Jackson died while under the protection of Sir Gilbert Elliot, probably in a Poor Law institution, it is unlikely that the date could have been much later than 1777, the year in which Sir Gilbert died. This would place the meeting of both artists shortly before this time, when Bewick was in his early twenties (he was born in 1753). Sir Gilbert lived in Minto House, Roxburghshire, Scotland, but no evidence can be found for the supposition that Jackson died in the vicinity. No obituary has been discovered. The record of Jackson’s death, if it exists, probably lies in a parish register somewhere on the Scottish border.
[ Critical Opinion]
In most histories of prints it was considered sufficient to note that certain artists worked in woodcut chiaroscuro; the quality of such work was rarely discussed. But Jackson was an exception: something about his prints aroused critics to defense or attack. The cleavage is absolute, strange for one who was presumably a mere reproductive artist. Nothing could show more clearly the unsettled nature of Jackson’s standing than a sampling of these opinions.
Horace Walpole in a letter, dated June 12, 1753, to Sir Horace Mann describing the furnishings in Strawberry Hill, commented:[43]