The Kootenay artwork of Edward Lange

A prolific artist whose work is well known on New York’s Long Island also created landscapes of West Kootenay mining towns in the mid-1890s.

Some of Edward Lange’s artwork has been reproduced in local history books, but it has rarely been attributed to him (or anyone else). Nor have the works been linked to each other, until now. While I was familiar with several of these images, it took me a long time to realize they were created by the same person.

Lange (1846-1912) immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1870. He lived on Long Island for nearly 20 years and executed numerous works of local scenes. Twenty-five of his paintings are now in the collection of Preservation Long Island and others are in public and private collections throughout that region.

Lange and his family moved to Olympia, Wash., in 1889, where he enjoyed greater commercial success, producing and selling prints showing various cities.

In May 1896, “Prof. Edward Lange” was reported as arriving in Spokane, where he was associated with the Spokane Art Company. That same month, Lange made a field trip, perhaps one of several, to the burgeoning mining towns of the West Kootenay.

Copies (or at least photographs of copies) of at least nine of his local works survive. Three are in the BC Archives, one is in the Selkirk College Archives, three are in a mining prospectus, and two are in a booklet I recently acquired. All are seen below.

“Town of Three Forks” (Image C-05210 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

“Town of Cody, terminus of the Kaslo and Slocan Rwy” (Image C-05423 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

Lange presented valleys that are wider than in real life and townsites and hillsides largely denuded of timber. While it’s true that the appetite for lumber led to a huge number of trees being cut down (with sometimes disastrous consequences due to avalanches), the images have an airiness that feels inauthentic.

Perhaps Lange found this more aesthetically pleasing, or it was just easier to include all the buildings and mines without having to worry about trees in the way.

Were the originals in colour? Possibly, but I’m not sure. The scenes seem more drawing-like than painting-like, and therefore could have been rendered in pencil or charcoal. While many examples of Lange’s earlier work are in colour, others are albumen prints or sepia toned. It would be remarkable to find a colour version of any of the scenes depicted here.

“New Denver, BC from Slocan Lake” (Courtesy Selkirk College Regional Archives)

The scene above appears on p. 264 of Peter Smith’s book, Silver Rush: British Columbia’s Silvery Slocan 1891-1900 and on p. 26 of Rita Moir’s book, The Third Crop, where the caption says “Edward Laing of Spokane is the best guess at the name of the artist.” While the spelling is a little off, it’s the first instance I know of where Lange’s local work was credited.

There are a few other works that I am certain are Lange’s but they are unsigned.

“The Reco Mines, Sandon, BC” (Image I-60951 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

The image above is attributed to the Bill Barlee collection. I suspect it has been cropped to remove the title and Lange’s signature. It appears in Silver Rush: British Columbia’s Silvery Slocan 1891-1900, p. 426 and on p. 77 of my book, The King of Sandon. The subject of the latter, John Morgan Harris, appears to have commissioned Lange to do several other works for the prospectus of the Reco Mining and Milling Co., issued in early 1898.

This panorama was included in the prospectus as a foldout. Again, the valley looks ridiculously wide. The image was reproduced on p. 8 of Veronika Pellowski’s Silver, Lead, & Hell: The Story of Sandon and I used it as the endpapers for The King of Sandon, but had not yet deduced Lange was the likely artist.

There are a couple of other images within the booklet itself that must have been Lange’s handiwork.

Correspondence survives on the creation of the prospectus, but unfortunately there is no mention of the artwork or the artist.

Which (if any) of these images was referred to in the Sandon Paystreak of March 27, 1897? The newspaper wrote: “The finest oil painting in town has just been completed for J.M. Harris. It shows all the mines on Reco mountain from the Reco to the R.E. Lee.”

None of these works look much like oil paintings. Some appear to be pencil or charcoal drawings, and in others the buildings seem to be rendered in pen and ink.

Maybe the Paystreak was wrong about the medium or maybe it was referring to something else entirely.

There are other images in the Reco prospectus that I haven’t included here because it’s unclear if they’re illustrations or very stylized photographs.

A “crayon sketch” of the Slocan Star mine, seen below, that appeared in the BC Mining Record of May 1898 sure looks like Lange’s work. It was reprinted in Silver Rush: British Columbia’s Silvery Slocan 1891-1900, p. 273.

The last two Lange images come from an 1896 photo booklet that I bought on eBay entitled Souvenir of West Kootenay.

The bottom image is signed “Edw. Lange, Artist, Address Spokane, Wash” and has the notation “Drawn after sketches from Nature, May 1896.” (Which is an odd way of putting it, as if those mines appeared by themselves.)

Lange’s visit or visits to the West Kootenay flew completely beneath the radar of local newspapers. I can’t find a single mention of his presence in the area, nor any sign of his prints being sold locally. There may well be other examples of his local work waiting to be discovered or recognized.

Lange died in Olympia in 1912. His house burned down soon afterward, destroying all the artwork he had on hand.

A postscript: Lange wasn’t the only artist turning out bird’s eye views of West Kootenay towns. Augustus Koch did one of Nelson in 1897 or 1898 that has been described as the holy grail of Nelson maps. The BC Archives has a black and white photograph of it, which is better than nothing, but Doug Jones has long been on a quest to find an original. He created his own coloured version, which you can buy at Cartolina Cards in Nelson.

Another view of Nelson, highlighting Rosemont, was created by the Angell Engraving Co. for realtors McQuarrie and Robertson. It was published in the Nelson Daily News in 1913, but no originals are known to exist.

An artist named Pigott also produced a bird’s eye view of Rossland that reportedly appeared in the October 1898 edition of The Miner and Electrician, published in Spokane, but I haven’t been able to find a copy.

Finally, a publication called The Overland Observer and Business Man’s Bulletin was said to have contained a bird’s eye view of Revelstoke in 1914, but I have never seen that publication, much less an original print. 

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For more on Sandon, check out kingofsandon.com