technical distinction
between Jackson's work and earlier chiaroscuros.

He [Jackson] conceived his prints in a different way from the
Italians, bringing in new aspects in accenting values and planes,
because he did not reproduce drawings but interpreted paintings. The
whites even show embossings in the paper to make the light vibrate,
and a specially cut block is sometimes impressed to help in modeling
the forms. Jackson, in short, very much the wood carver, combined
the resources of the cameo with those of the chiaroscuro and
produced curious works of combined techniques, but without equaling
his predecessors, who were particularly remarkable for their
simplicity of style and treatment.

[Footnote 51: Gusman, 1916, pp. 164, 165.]

One year later, in 1917, Max J. Friedlaender[52] 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 expression, is the physical relief that
stands out in thick and soft paper with the sharp pressure of die
wood-blocks.... No one has employed the relief of the woodcut 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-printing," entirely without bordering
lines or contrasting colors, merely through relief pressing.

[Footnote 52: Friedlaender, 1926 (1st ed. 1917), pp. 224-226.]

Anton Reichel's important history of chiaroscuro, with its magnificent
color plates in facsimile, appeared in 1926.[53] 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
separate tones the extrao