Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Jackson, John Baptist
JACKSON, JOHN BAPTIST (1701–1780?), wood-engraver, born in 1701, is stated to have been a pupil of Elisha Kirkall [q. v.], and it has been conjectured that he and Kirkall engraved conjointly the anonymous wood-engravings in Croxall's edition of ‘Æsop's Fables.’ Some cuts to an edition of Dryden's ‘Poems’ in 1717 bear Jackson's initials. About 1726 Jackson went to Paris, where he was employed on engraving vignettes and illustrations for books, working under the well-known wood-engraver, Papillon, who has left a depreciatory notice of Jackson as a man and as an artist. Not being successful in Paris, Jackson went to Rome about 1731, and shortly afterwards removed to Venice, where he resided some years. At Venice Jackson engraved a fine title-page to an Italian translation of Suetonius's ‘Lives of the Cæsars’ (1738), and also devoted himself to a revival of the disused art of engraving in colours or chiaroscuro, by the superimposition of a number of different blocks. He published in 1738 as his first essay, in coloured engraving, ‘The Descent from the Cross’ by Rembrandt, now in the National Gallery, but then in the collection of Mr. Joseph Smith, the British consul at Venice, who patronised and employed Jackson. In 1745 he published a set of seventeen large coloured engravings from pictures by Titian, Paolo Veronese, and other Venetian painters, entitled ‘Titiani Vecelii, Pauli Caliari, Jacobi Robusti, et Jacopi de Ponte opera selectiora a Joanne Baptista Jackson Anglo ligno cœlata et coloribus adumbrata.’ He also engraved some chiaroscuros after Parmigiano, six coloured landscapes after Marco Ricci, and a portrait of Algernon Sydney. After twenty years on the continent Jackson returned to England, and started a manufactory of paper-hangings, printed in chiaroscuro, at Battersea, the first of its kind in England. In 1754 he published ‘An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaroscuro, as practised by Albert Dürer, Hugo di Carpi, &c., and the Applications of it to the Making Paper-hangings of Taste, Duration, and Elegance.’ Thomas Bewick, writing in his diary about 1780, notes that Jackson lived in old age at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and died in an asylum near the Teviot or on Tweedside.
[Chatto and Jackson's Hist. of Wood Engraving; Linton's Masters of Wood Engraving; Dodd's manuscript Hist. of English Engravers (Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 33402); Redgrave's Dict. of Artists.]