The painter, Benjamin Calau, was a boarder at his home and inspired Jacob to pursue a career in art.

First, he went to Berlin, where he took private lessons from Bernhard Rode for three years, but his primary influences came from Blaise Nicholas Le Sueur and his student, Paul Joseph Bardou, at the Prussian Academy.

In 1770, he transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and perfected his skills with its director, Giovanni Battista Casanova.

There, he received orders for drawings from that city's numerous publishing houses, many of them made into engravings by Christian Gottlieb Geyser.

In 1776, together with his friend and former fellow student, Heinrich Friedrich Füger, he traveled to Italy, where he made his decision to focus on landscape painting; taking Claude Lorrain and Jakob Philipp Hackert as his models.