He [Jackson] conceived his prints in a different way from the Italians, bringing in new aspects in accenting values and planes, because he did not reproduce drawings but interpreted paintings. The whites even show embossings in the paper to make the light vibrate, and a specially cut block is sometimes impressed to help in modeling the forms. Jackson, in short, very much the wood carver, combined the resources of the cameo with those of the chiaroscuro and produced curious works of combined techniques, but without equaling his predecessors, who were particularly remarkable for their simplicity of style and treatment.
One year later, in 1917, Max J. Friedländer[52] commented that relief effects in block printing were not alien additions but natural consequences of the method. His main emphasis, we note, is on the Ricci prints.
A peculiarity of the color woodcut, which first was put up with as a characteristic of the technique but finally was enhanced and utilized fully as a means of expression, is the physical relief that stands out in thick and soft paper with the sharp pressure of die wood-blocks.... No one has employed the relief of the woodcut so consciously and artfully as the Englishman John Baptist Jackson in the eighteenth century, who, particularly in some landscapes, created most effective and richly colored sheets. He has gone so far as to express forms in “blind-printing,” entirely without bordering lines or contrasting colors, merely through relief pressing.
Anton Reichel’s important history of chiaroscuro, with its magnificent color plates in facsimile, appeared in 1926.[53] He says of Jackson that his activity in chiaroscuro was “extraordinarily rich,” that he created broad approximations of his subjects which made him neglect details, but that these were “convincingly translated into the language of the woodcut.”
Five heroic landscapes after M. Ricci represent the artistic high point of his work, having a distinctive richness of color not previously attained by any other master of chiaroscuro. Each of the prints has a complete harmony of colors; the single color blocks—over ten can be counted in each print—which show in their separate tones the extraordinarily cultivated taste of the artist, give the composition a decorative effect far from any realistic imitation of nature.... The relief impressed with the blocks is so strong that, going beyond all other prior attempts of the kind, it represents an essential factor of the composition through its actual light-and-shadow effects.
Although by this time Jackson’s chiaroscuros were regarded with respect and his color prints were acknowledged to be of prime importance, some of the conservative wallpaper historians were still repelled by their vigor, which did not suit genteel notions of interior decoration. Sugden and Edmondson[54] in 1925 certainly
failed to understand both Jackson’s work and the period in which it was done. They comment:
Jackson’s bold claims to originality and merit are scarcely borne out by anything he is known to have achieved. That he had a vogue, however, seems certain, for apart from his “Essay” he has come down to us as a historical figure. To modern tastes in art many of his productions seem almost monstrous, and yet they were to some extent the expression of the time-spirit in which they were born.