Obituary from the Crayon (1858)
«It's hard to believe that it has been twenty-six years since the first observance of Day Without Art, which coincides with World AIDS Day on December 1. I still vividly remember the strange and intense combination of passion, fear, and loss we felt. In the intervening years AIDS has become a manageable disease for those with access to health care. Still, I cannot help but remember the losses we suffered and all of the careers cut short: Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, and David Wojnarowicz, among many visual artists. Of course, there have always been artists who died young: Egon Schiele died at the age of twenty-eight in the flu pandemic following World War I; and Jean-Michel Basquiat died at twenty-seven of a drug overdose.»
What all these artists share, in addition to their short lives, is that they left behind a substantial body of work for which they are still known. That is not true of all artists. One letter in our digital collections continues to haunt me ever since I first cataloged it.
D.J. Glasgow letter to Samuel P. Avery, October 8, 1857
This letter from D.J. Glasgow to the early American art dealer Samuel P. Avery, part of our collection of letters to him, makes me think of all the artists who are completely forgotten because they died too young. We know very little about him, including his first name: some sources give his name as David, others as Daniel. In this letter he asks for money so he can go home to Ireland because of ill health and lack of success. He must have made it home somehow, as noted in his obituary that appeared the following year in the Crayon:
We regret being obliged to chronicle this month the death of Daniel Glasgow, Jr. Mr. Glasgow's talents as an artist, his youth and amiability, will cause his death to be sincerely lamented by a large circle of friends. Had Mr. Glasgow lived, he would probably have been excelled by none among us as a painter in water-colors. He died at Kilrea, Ireland, on the 29th of January, of consumption, in the 24th year of his age.