One year later, in 1917, Max J. Friedlander" 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 expres- 

 sion, is the physical relief that stands out in thick and soft paper with the sharp 

 pressure of the wood-blocks. . . . No one has employed the relief of the wood- 

 cut 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-pruit- 

 ing," 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." 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 sepa- 

 rate tones the extraordinarily cultivated taste of the artist, give the composition a 

 decorative effect far from any realistic imitation of nature. . . . The relief im- 

 pressed with the blocks is so strong that, going beyond all other prior attempts of 

 the kind, it represents an essential factor of die 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 conj- 

 servative wallpaper historians were still repelled by their vigor, which did not 

 suit genteel notions of interior decoration. Sugden and Edmondson " in 1925 cer- 



"^ Friedlander, 1926 (ist ed. 1917), pp. 224-226. 



''^Reichel, 1926, p. 48. 



" Sugden and Edmondson, 1925, p. 71. 



53 



