[ Octavian Blewitt, Secretary, Royal Literary Fund. ] Autograph Letter Signed ('Octavian Blewitt') to 'Mr. Croker', regarding Brockedon's collection.

1p., 12mo. In good condition, lightly aged, tipped-in onto a piece of paper cut from an album. Reads: 'My dear Mr Croker, | Here is Brockedon's answer - I am sorry that he cannot meet your wishes - but you will see he has never exhibited the Collection even at the Graphic which he originated.' The Graphic was a club founded by Brockedon in 1833. The subject of the letter may be the collection described as follows in Brockedon's entry in the Oxford DNB: 'two volumes he compiled as an inheritance for his son of portrait drawings in pencil, each accompanied by an autograph letter from the sitter, and which he referred to as ‘Philip's book of his father's friends’ (letter from Henry Hopley White to the artist, NPG, Heinz Archive). These 104 drawings constitute an informal record of his great contemporaries, and range over the worlds of art, literature, geography, and science in which Brockedon himself had moved. The series begins in 1823 and continues until July 1849, but the son for whom it was intended, at that time a promising pupil of Brunel, died of consumption on 13 November 1849 aged only twenty-seven. The albums passed instead to Brockedon's daughter Elizabeth, and were bequeathed to the National Gallery by her son in 1926. The drawings were formally transferred to the National Portrait Gallery in 1994'