Excursions: Go back in time with Edward Lange’s Long Island

Editor’s note: We became aware of the Edward Lange exhibit at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook while at last month’s Northport Chamber of Commerce meeting. A fellow chamber member said we should look into it, as there were images of Northport she really enjoyed. We’ll be checking out the exhibit in person later this month. You should, too. Maybe take the kids for a hike afterward. Or go by yourself and grab some coffee.

While living on Long Island between 1870 and 1889, Edward Lange painted and sketched homesteads, storefronts, railroad depots, and harbors across Long Island, including scenes from Northport, with precision and accuracy.

Lange (1846-1912) emigrated with his family from Germany to New York in the 1860s. By 1870 the self-taught painter moved out to Elwood, where he began to relay the region’s towns, landscapes, and industries with trademark detail. Before moving to Washington State in 1889, Lange produced many dozens – perhaps hundreds – of works of art on Long Island.

“Land by Hand: Edward Lange’s Long Island,” now on view at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, is a collaborative exhibition with Preservation Long Island; it gives visitors a unique view of the late 19th century through the work of the prolific artist. The exhibition, spanning Lange’s five decades of work from 1871 to 1912, provides audiences an insider’s look at communities from New York City to Sag Harbor as they were transformed by growing populations, transportations, and new businesses and technologies. Most of the architecture (look for Northport’s thimble factory), cultural landscapes, industries, and modes of transportation documented in Lange’s work are now gone, but through his art he offers a rare and exciting window back to a very different time.

“The key to his artistic process was achieving a composition filled with selective detail, highlighting elements of a scene that might otherwise fade to the background or remain out of sight entirely when viewed through the lens of a camera,” wrote Peter Fedoryk, curatorial fellow, on the Preservation Long Island website. Mr. Fedoryk describes that selective detail in a piece of Lange’s work that focuses on a well-traveled corner in Northport Village.

“These details of Lange’s work are some of their most captivating features,” he wrote. “In an elevated view across Northport’s Lower Main Street that dates to 1880, for example, Lange paid careful attention to the jewelry shop of Sammis & Oakley. We look past a woman window-shopping and peruse, along with her, their wares of necklaces, pocket watches, and clocks – each face carefully illustrated with the tiniest of clock hands showing the time of day.”

In another painting, Lange details the landscape around that thimble factory, near what is now Scudder Avenue and the corner of Woodbine. Originally the store of George S. Soper, the building eventually became Leffert’s and then the G.S. Sanford store. According to Terry Reid, curator at the Northport Historical Society, in the Lange painting, the building was closer to the shoreline – it was moved to higher ground in the 1880s. Today it would be where the LILCO building is; the building as painted by Lange was torn down and the new, bigger brick building constructed in the 1920s.

The Long Island Museum is located at 1200 Route 25A in Stony Brook. The full-scale gallery exhibition “Land by Hand: Edward Lange’s Long Island”