Dyck, Mytens, Lely, Kneller,
Zoffany, and Van Loo, among others, native painters seemed crude and
provincial. The list of foreign artists other than portraitists who
visited England before 1750 for varying periods is also impressive.

If good native painters were rare in the first decades of the 18th
century, good engravers or woodcutters were even rarer. Hogarth, whose
earliest prints were produced in the 1720's, received his training from
a silversmith.

Jackson's next move was toward the Continent.

_Paris: Perfection of a Craft_

Jackson arrived in Paris in 1725, his age 24 if we accept 1701 as his
birth date. Here flourished a brilliant community of artists, craftsmen,
dealers, and connoisseurs; woodcutting, etching, and line engraving were
highly developed and the printing offices made extensive use of woodcuts
for decoration and illustration. The woodcut tradition mimicked line
engraving and was confined chiefly to tiny blocks wrought with the
utmost delicacy. The main influence came from the 17th century-- in
particular from the etchings and line engravings of Sebastien Le Clerc
and from the etchings of Jacques Callot, whose simple system of swelling
parallel lines, with occasional cross-hatchings, was adopted by both
line engravers and woodcutters.

Le Clerc, whose style was influenced by Callot, had produced a vast
number of illustrations involving subjects of almost every type; his
designs, therefore, were ready-made for publishers who wanted good but
low-priced illustrations. Woodcutters copied his engravings shamelessly,
line for line. The overblown high Baroque style in ornament, swag, and
cartouche was also drawn upon as a source for decorative cuts. In an
attempt to imitate the full tonal scale of engraving, the woodcutters
used heavier lines in the foreground to detach the main figures from the
background, which was made up of more delicate lines. Background lines
were often narrowed further by scraping down their edges, an operation
that caused them to merge imperceptibly into the white paper. In this
way, although the natural vigor of the woodcut suffered, an effect of
space and distance was achieved. Because of the small scale this
technique was difficult, especially when cross-hatching was added, and
special knives as well as a phenomenal deftness were needed to work out
these bits of jewelry on the plank grain of pear, cherry, box, and
serviceberry wood.

Jackson's initial impression of t