John Baptist Jackson

After experimenting with chiaroscuro prints in Paris, Jackson developed his methods further in Venice, where in 1735 he designed a cylinder press capable of printing larger sheets under greater pressure. Jackson was introduced to Zanetti, whose prints he later dismissed as “a trifling Performance” (see Jacob Kainen, John Baptist Jackson: 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut, no. 222, United States National Museum Bulletin, Smithsonian Institution [1962], p. 25). He was critical particularly of their having been hand-printed, rather than done on a press. Jackson turned to the challenge of reproducing oil paintings to capitalize on the market for images of paintings seen by British and other travelers on the Grand Tour. The ambitious “Venetian Set” reproduces 17 different paintings, often printed on two or more sheets. Commissioned by British consul and renowned collector Joseph Smith, the series sold by subscription and took four and half years to complete. Despite artistic success, it was a commercial failure. Jackson returned to England and started a chiaroscuro wallpaper business in 1752, which also failed.

The pressure of the cylinder press allowed Jackson to emboss the paper deeply with each block, as can be seen in the texture of the sky and columns of Marriage at Cana. As a result, the sheets could not be completely flattened without damaging the embossing, and the buckling of these impressions is typical of the series. The differences in the tones of the inks in the two sheets are due to the difficulties of matching exact shades before the invention of commercial standardized inks.