J. W. Glass

The Committee bearing in mind the original objects of the Association to produce a kindly and cordial feeling amongst artists, authors and the friends of art have considered it proper within the present week to make an exception to the ordinary purpose to which these rooms are dedicated. A former member [J. W. Glass], an artist after years of absence during which he was winning a world wide reputation returned to us recently and came to our rooms to seek out old friends and renew old ties. In an hour of darkness and over-burthened with some secret grief, with no friend at hand to counsel and no arm to save he passed suddenly and fearfully from time to eternity. A stranger and under a stranger’s roof he was hurried at once to a public vault without the forms of Christian burial. His friends, many of them members of the Club[,] when advised of the fact determined that so discreditable a proceeding should not take place and requested of the Committee the use of these rooms for the purposes of the funeral. They cheerfully granted the request, and those members who were present at the impressive ceremony and listened to the classic & beautiful funeral discourse will hear testimony that there was nothing inconsistent with high art or with the strictest good taste and appropriateness in the whole transaction—even if the memory of our friend did not call for this small token of our respect.

T. Bailey Myers
Annual Meeting Minutes, 5 January 1856