each impression to eliminate shrinking and to keep it soft for printing. This 

 method would explain Jackson's transparent effects. 



Although the Ricci prints were certainly the most ambitious and complexly 

 planned prints of the century, the cutting is crisp and decisive and the effect fresh 

 and unlabored. As in the Venetian set embossing is consciously applied. Most 

 likely Jackson impressed the finished prints, specially redampened for the purpose, 

 with one or two of the uninked blocks. Jackson interpreted Ricci's qualities with 

 great spirit, and in doing so he liberated the color woodcut from its old conven- 

 tions. The "true"-color prints he produced in the medium preceded the Japanese, 

 if not the Chinese.^' In Japan, it must be remembered, simple color printing in rose 

 and green supplanted hand coloring in about 1741, and rudimentary polychrome 

 prints can be dated as early as 1745, but, as Binyon ^' puts it, "it was not until 1764 

 that the first rather tentative nishikj-yc, or complete colour-prints were produced in 

 Yedo, and the long reign of the Primitives came to an end." 



In making his Ricci prints Jackson sought a method of color printing that 

 would overcome the deficiencies of Jacob Christoph Le Blon's three-color mezzo- 

 tint process. Le Blon, a Frenchman born in Germany, had begim experimenting 

 with color printing as early as 1705. His idea was to split the chromatic compo- 

 nents of a picture into three basic hues — blue, red, and yellow — in gradations of 

 intensity so that varying amounts of color, each on a separate copper plate, could 

 be printed in superimposition to reconstitute the original picture. This was based 

 upon a simplification of Newton's seven primaries. Later, Le Blon added a fourth, 

 black plate. Incredibly, this is the principle of modern commercial color printing, 

 the only difference being that Le Blon did not have a camera, color filters, and the 

 halftone screen at his disposal and had to make the separations by hand. Le Blon 

 came to London in 1719, produced an enormous number of color prints, published 

 his Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colour'mg in Painting in a very small edition 

 about 1722 (it is undated), and shortly thereafter failed disastrously. About 1733 

 he returned to Paris, where he attracted a few followers. Most of his prints have 

 disappeared, only about fifty being known at present. 



^' Altdorfer's Beautiful Virgin of Ratisbon, about 1520, (B. 51, vol. 8, p. 78) made use of five colors 

 in some impressions (Lippmann describes one with seven colors) but these were used primarily for 

 decorative, not naturalistic purposes. 



'- Laurence Binyon, A Catalogue of Japanese &■ Chinese Woodcuts in the British Museum, London, 

 1916, p. XX, Introduction. 



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