on's
wallpaper venture. Oman[39] comments:

The use of wall-paper to imitate large architectural designs dates,
as we have seen, from the days of J. B. Jackson. During the
remainder of the century this style was used almost exclusively for
decoration of the halls and staircases of great houses.

[Footnote 39: Oman, 1929, p. 33.]

These papers covered rooms with landscape panoramas or with landscapes
in Rococo scroll frames, relieved by decorative panels with busts,
statuettes, and floral ornaments. As in preceding work, they were
usually painted in opaque water colors. Most of the landscapes were
loose transcriptions of designs by Pannini, Vernet, Lancret and other
painters of architectural, scenic, and pastoral subjects. The treatment
was generalized and superficial, the touch light and detached.

In this approach to wallpaper we see the basic ideas of Jackson, but
with more emphasis on charm and elegance. Ironically, as years passed
and original sources grew obscure, it became the tendency to attribute
scenic papers in great houses to Jackson.[40] If he was a failure as a
pioneer in the field, he remained its most highly prized legend.

[Footnote 40: An excellent description of the papers of this type
imported to America is given by Edna Donnell in _Metropolitan
Museum Studies 1932_, vol. 4, pp. 77-108.]

The _Essay_ continued with a criticism of the current taste in
wallpaper. Jackson enlarged on the lack of discrimination of persons who
would prefer popular papers to his.

It seems, also, as if there was great Reason to suspect wherever one
sees such preposterous Furniture, that the Taste in Literature of
that Person who directed it was very deficient, and that it would
prefer _Tom D'Urfy_ to _Shakespear_, _Sir Richard Blackmore_ to
_Milton_, _Tate_ to _Homer_, an _Anagrammatist_ to _Virgil_,
_Horace_, or any other Writer of true Wit, either Ancient or Modern.

He added that his prints, made in oil colors, would be permanent
"whereas in that done with Water-Colours, in the common Way, Six Months
makes a very visible Alteration in all that preposterous Glare, which
makes its whole Merit...."

The _Essay_ has eight plates, four of ancient statues in chiaroscuro and
four of plants, animals, and buildings, in probably six colors. They
were hastily done and no doubt had a rather fresh charm when published,
but unfortunately the oil in the pigments was inferior, and every prin