the circle in which they were admired. To enumerate the great variety o£ these 

 pictures would be a task. 



Bewick adds that some of these popular woodcuts, akhough 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 be- 

 hind the continental countries, which could boast of centuries of celebrated masters. 

 The medieval period persisted in England until the time of Henry VIII. Tradi- 

 tional religious subjects, so indispensable to European art, were thereafter gener- 

 ally 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 person- 

 ages 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 por- 

 traitists who visited England before 1750 for varying periods is also impressive. 



If good native painters were rare in the first decades of the i8th century, good 

 engravers or woodcutters were even rarer. Hogarth, whose earliest prints were 

 produced in die 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 connois- 

 seurs; woodcutting, etching, and line engraving were highly developed and the 

 printing oflfices made extensive use of woodcuts for decoration and illustration. The 



17 



