banal, story-telling oil paintings with a high, waxy finish. Neither aquatint nor 

 other copper-plate media were suitable for these products, and color lithography 

 did not receive serious attention until the late 1830's. The wood engraving, which 

 had inherited the function of the woodcut and which had greater flexibility in 

 rendering tones and details, became tlie logical vehicle for the new color picture. 



In this situation Jackson suddenly appeared as the pioneer, as the father of 

 printed pictures based upon paintings in oil or water colors. His intention had 

 been translation rather than imitation and he would have abhorred the feeble new 

 product, but this did not concern his successors — they were interested only in his 

 technical principles. Moreover, in their naivete, they imagined they were improv- 

 ing on Jackson because their prints were counterfeit paintings while his were not. 



The earliest picture printers therefore, used wood engraving. Among them 

 were Frederich W. Gubitz of Berlin, who began the revival about 1815; William 

 Savage'" of London, a printer who published a book describing his project in 

 1822; and George Baxter of London, whose work dates from about 1830. All 

 started with chiaroscuro and moved to full color from a large niunber of wood 

 blocks, although in 1836 Baxter began printing his transparent oil colors over a 

 base of steel engraving reinforced with aquatint. Only Baxter persevered and was 

 rewarded by sensational popular success. His glassy and trivial prints with their 

 high sweet finish enjoyed a vogue among collectors that lasted into the 20th cen- 

 tury. In about i860, however, he was driven from the market by the rise of a 

 cheaper medium, chromolithography, which was responsible in the next few 

 decades for a universal outpouring of popular bathos. This was picture printing 

 in color geared for the mass audience. 



It may seem an anticlimax to trace the color woodcut from Jackson to Baxter, 

 and finally to chromolithography, but it is not irrelevant. Although spurned by 

 the better artists, color had too popular an appeal to be ignored. It was inescapable 

 that Jackson's successful technical procedures should finally be adopted and cor- 

 rupted in the area of commerce. 



Woodcut artists up to Jackson, with few exceptions, had used color for one 

 major purpose, to reproduce drawings in line and tone. By enlarging the concep- 

 tion of the color woodcut Jackson brought the primitive chiaroscuro phase of its 



*' Savage, 1822. Jackson's pioneer work is acknowledged, pp. 15-16. 



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