Promoting Long Island: New Book Investigates the Art of Edward Lange

by Lauren Brincat and Peter Fedoryk

In February of 1893, Edward Lange (1846–1912) penned a four-page letter from Olympia, WA—one of the few extant documents by his hand—to his longtime friend on Long Island, Carll S. Burr (1831–1916), offering an odd reflection on the nearly 20 years he spent in New York. He assured Burr that, although he missed the time they spent together, he emphatically did not miss the rest of his time on Long Island. “Such feelings of homesickness after my former fields of labor I have not had yet, not a moment,” the artist insisted—and yet his two decades on Long Island were some of his most productive.¹ During that span, Lange settled into a new house and became a landowner. He met his future wife, with whom he would share six children, and rendered the nearly 200 artworks that we know of today. By all counts, save his own it seems, Lange built a productive artistic career on Long Island. Yet the full picture of his tenure in New York has long proved elusive.

For more than half a century, Preservation Long Island (PLI) has been collecting artworks by Edward Lange. PLI’s latest publication, Promoting Long Island: The Art of Edward Lange, 1870–1889, supported in part by a Decorative Arts Trust Dean F. Failey Grant, is the outgrowth and culmination of The Art of Edward Lange Project, a multi-year effort to bring the study of this artist into the 21st century.

The nearly 30 original watercolors, drawings, and photographs in our collection represent the full range of his artistic oeuvre. The first piece acquired (in 1968) was an albumen photographic print showing a view of Port Jefferson from Cedar Hill Cemetery (figure 1). The artist made and sold many copies of an original 1881 India ink drawing of this view. Lange’s inclusion of what is almost certainly a rare self-portrait in the center foreground is a reminder that he was part of the same landscapes and communities that he imaginatively turned into aesthetically pleasing artworks. With this in mind, PLI’s latest effort to study the artist’s life braids newly uncovered information about his background with colorful sketches of the communities he encountered on Long Island.

Lange’s artistic journey in America began when he stepped off the SS Frankfurt onto the docks of New York Harbor on July 16, 1870.² He traveled from Germany, specifically the independent country of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, where he spent his first 24 years, and made his way to Commack in Suffolk County. In 1872, Lange’s father transferred the deed to family property to Edward as an advance on his portion of the family inheritance.³

Lange’s parents, the publisher Gustav Georg (1812–73) and Sophie (1813–71) Lange, never lived in the United States and raised Edward in the city of Darmstadt—the duchy’s capital—along with nine other children. Far from the self-taught immigrant that previous accounts have described, Lange came from a highly educated extended family with deep ties to artistic pursuits, many of whom helped set Edward on a path to finding a career in the family trade across the Atlantic. His father and uncles built successful careers making, printing, and distributing volumes of landscape scenes of German, European, and overseas locales.

Lange’s earliest works made on Long Island suggest his efforts to apply the artistic tradition around which he was raised to the rural environment that he encountered in New York. His draftsmanlike handling of architectural forms in these pastoral images became hallmarks of his style in the years to follow (figure 2). Many early views share visual similarity with the vernacular landscape pictures made by a host of fellow immigrant itinerant artists active throughout upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Fritz Vogt (1842–1900), Ferdinand Brader (1833–1901), and Charles C. Hofmann (c. 1820–82). Although at times geographically distant from one another, artists depicting scenes in this style were connected by an extended diaspora of European migrants that, by the end of the 19th century, stretched across North America. Their efforts, numerous and widespread, collectively make up the most extensive visual documentation of the United States’ rural hinterland in the decades surrounding the arrival of the industrial revolution.

Lange witnessed dramatic change on Long Island between his arrival in 1870 and departure for the West Coast in 1889 in search of even greater opportunities. Urban forces emanating eastward from the metropolitan hubs of New York City and Brooklyn permanently transformed Long Island’s rural, primarily agricultural, landscape. Its population doubled during these two decades, from just over five hundred thousand in 1870 to more than a million in 1890. New industrial manufactories opened in droves along the North Shore and provided the region’s growing population with jobs and finished goods. The Long Island Rail Road entered its heyday, consolidating and expanding its services to provide unprecedented access to all parts of the region. Investors opened hotels and resorts in seaside towns that quickly rose in popularity and welcomed thousands of visitors every year. This was the heyday of Coney Island and Rockaway Beach. In the midst of this bustling world, Lange became well known for his ability to render watercolors and sketches of houses, railroad depots, commercial businesses, and village waterfronts with fastidious detail. To a local audience and visitors alike, Lange’s artwork showcased iconic Long Island sights.

These landscape scenes and vignettes were more than just visual documentations of Long Island. Lange intended them to actively promote and advertise the area. Visual advertising increasingly became his focus, not just in promoting spaces and places but specific businesses. On July 9, 1880, The Long-Islander announced Lange’s completion of a “handsome water color” of the Brown Brothers Pottery in Huntington (figure 3).⁴ The artist’s depiction provides an in-depth view of the pottery at work. Workers bustling around the site can be seen moving and packing a number of forms for distribution. Active on the east side of Huntington Harbor under various owners and names between about 1805 and 1902, the pottery provided beautiful, utilitarian salt-glazed stoneware and lead-glazed earthenware to the people of Long Island, New York City, and Connecticut. The editor of The Long-Islander remarked in July of that year that they were “pleased to notice that our artist, E. Lange, is also gaining the celebrity that justice to his skill demands.”⁵ Lange produced several other notable works around this time highlighting regional and local businesses, including Huntington Depot (figure 4) and Lower Main Street, Northport (figure 5).

The artist worked to insinuate himself in the business of bringing economic success to commercial enterprises and local communities across Long Island. In late summer 1881, Lange announced his first foray into subscription work. He proposed to paint a collection of watercolor scenes around the town of Huntington to be photographed as a set. Interested patrons could advance $1.50 to secure a copy of this work, or $1.00 per copy if purchasing more than one. Later that fall, additional copies sold for $2.25.⁶ Scenes of local towns exploded in popularity after the United States’s Centennial in 1876, and Lange met the demand head-on. He produced more than a dozen artworks composed of collaged views of different towns during the 1880s, photographed the finished pieces, and sold albumen prints at lower rates than he would his original pieces. Both residents and visiting tourists eagerly purchased Lange’s photographs as keepsakes.

The booming age of tourism on Long Island during the 1880s provided further opportunity for Lange to market his skills to the owners of myriad hotels and resorts on the North and South Shores. The sheer quantity of advertising ephemera these businesses disseminated to the public—letterhead, trade cards, souvenir scenes—prompted Lange to again turn to photographic technology as a way of making his hand-drawn pictures easily reproducible. Photoengraving, a process that converted photographic negatives into etched printing plates, enabled the artist to turn out customized ephemera for his clients. His adoption of new technology ultimately led him to adjust his artistic process in order to produce mock-up artwork meant for photoengraving, exemplified in examples like the Grand Central Hotel (figure 6). This commercial advertisement, depicting a hotel in Hicksville, was created using collaged pieces of line-printed paper overpainted with India ink and white gouache highlights. Lange’s adoption of this seemingly idiosyncratic mixed media form was ultimately dictated by the requirements of the photoengraving process, which necessitated artwork composed of clear linework and stark contrasts between light and dark to achieve the necessary resolution in the final plate.

For all the ways that Lange’s artwork reveals new details about Long Island’s built environment in a time before 20th-century suburbanization, it also played a meaningful role as part of the machine of expansion that made later development possible. The new book demonstrates how Lange’s artwork can be viewed in a number of ways: informational about the past and insightful when characterized as autobiographical about his life. However, the artwork can also be misleading when thought to fully encapsulate Long Island’s history. As contributing essayist Jennifer L. Anderson warns, “when regarded with a more critical eye… the supposed verisimilitude of his work begins to show cracks… Lange actually composed and edited his images with great care. Upon closer inspection, his body of work proves to be quite subjective and highly idealized…” Authors of this volume do not shy away from drawing connections between Lange’s art and episodes of 19th-century history previously unassociated with his work—including the prevalence of the cotton trade in New York, the plight of laborers in Long Island’s factories and hotels, and the unjust treatment of Montaukett and Shinnecock people at the hands of real estate developers and railroad tycoons. Engaging with these historical narratives in conjunction with Lange’s artwork helps demonstrate exactly how much is not depicted within the artist’s incredibly detailed pictures. Only then, after reconciling the imagined worlds Lange painted on paper with the real historical record, are we able to attain a more complete understanding of the late 19th-century Long Island the artist navigated and the kind of life he lived there.

Promoting Long Island: The Art of Edward Lange, 1870–1889 is edited by Lauren Brincat and Peter Fedoryk and features contributing essays by Jennifer L. Anderson, Thomas Busciglo-Ritter, and Joshua M. Ruff. The hardcover book features over 100 color images and is available for purchase at
preservationlongisland.org.

1. Edward Lange, “Letter from Edward Lange to Carll S. Burr,” February 6, 1893, Preservation Long Island, 2008.00.11.
   2. “New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957,” microfilm serial M237, line 46, list no. 683, July 16, 1870, Records of the US Customs Service, RG 36, National Archives, Washington, DC.
2. Deed between William C. Lange and Mathilda Lange and Gustav Georg Lange,” July 26, 1856, Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Archives, liber 90, 113–17; and “Indenture between Gustav Georg Lange and Edward Lange,” May 18, 1872, Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Archives, liber 189, 87–91.
3. The Long-Islander (Huntington, NY), July 9, 1880, 2.
4. Ibid., July 16, 1880, 2.
5. Ibid., August 26, 1881, 2.

Lauren Brincat is the Chief Curator and Director of Collections at Preservation Long Island. Peter Fedoryk is a PhD student in the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware and served as the lead researcher for The Art of Edward Lange Project from 2021 to 2023.

A print version of this article was published in The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, one of our most popular member benefits. Join today!