The Rev. D. Y. Blakiston was born in 1832. He studied art at the Royal Academy Schools especially under W. Dobson, R.A. From about 1850 to 1865 he painted in London and at St. Leonard’s, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. About 1865 he entered at Downing College, took Orders in 1869, and was presented to the living of East Grinstead in 1871, which he held till his retirement soon after 1908. He died in 1914. Throughout his life he made a practise of sketching his friends. I suppose he must have met and sketched Butler on some occasion when Butler was in London staying with his cousins the Worsleys. The artist’s son, the Rev. H. E. D. Blakiston, when President of Trinity College, Oxford, gave me a cutting from The East Grinstead Observer containing a full obituary of him. It is among the papers at St. John’s College, and is referred to in the Postscript to the Preface to my Memoir of Butler.
HENRY FESTING JONES
3. My first attempt at a drawing in pencil and ink of Butler’s Homestead, Mesopotamia, New Zealand.
I did it in 1910 or thereabouts from a faded photograph taken about 1863 and lent to Butler by J. D. Enys. Also Emery Walker’s reproduction of my first attempt which was not used in the Memoir.
4. My second attempt, which was reproduced in the Memoir.
SAMUEL BUTLER
5. Water-colour: A view in Cambridge.
Probably done when Butler was an undergraduate, and given to St. John’s some years ago. I found it in the book wherein I found Blakiston’s drawing (no. 2).
6. Oil Painting: Family Prayers.
On the ceiling he wrote “I did this in 1864, and if I had gone on doing things out of my own head instead of making studies I should have been all right.” (Memoir, I. 115.) Reproduced in the Memoir, ch. xxiv., and referred to, ch. viii.