He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Alexander Pope.
Earlier in the year the elder Tonson was in town, and Pope, writing to Lord Oxford, said that if he would come to see him he would show him a phenomenon worth seeing, "old Jacob Tonson, who is the perfect image and likeness of Bayle's Dictionary; so full of matter, secret history, and wit and spirit, at almost fourscore."
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At Amsterdam and Rotterdam he met Addison, and assisted in some abortive negotiations for Addison's employment as travelling companion to Lord Hertford, son of the Duke of Somerset.
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Tonson published editions of John Dryden and John Milton, and is best known for having obtained a copyright on the plays of William Shakespeare by buying up the rights of the heirs of the publisher of the Fourth Folio after the Statute of Anne went into effect.
Although he appears to have painted other types of work than portraits, the only works other than portraits known to survive are his eight (out of a total of twelve plates prefacing each book of the poem) engraved book illustrations for the fourth edition, the first to be illustrated, of Paradise Lost by John Milton, published in London by Jacob Tonson in 1688.
Jacob | John Jacob Astor | Jacob M. Appel | Jacob Epstein | Jacob Zuma | Jacob Obrecht | Jacob Lawrence | Jacob Appel | John Jacob Astor IV | Irène Jacob | Jacob Jordaens | Paul Jacob | Meshullam ben Jacob | Jacob Riis | Jacob Grimm | Jacob Christian Schäffer | Jacob Appelbaum | Jacob Truedson Demitz | Jacob ter Veldhuis | Jacob's Ladder | Jacob's biscuits | Jacob's Award | Jacob Rothschild | Jacob L. Devers | Jacob Latimore | Jacob Kirkegaard | Jacob Kielland | Jacob J. Shubert | Jacob Hackenburg Griffiths-Randolph | Jacob Bronowski |