New Jersey’s Atlantic City emerged as a booming Edwardian seaside destination in the 1870s. From its famed boardwalk (the first in the United States), tourists could reach hotels and restaurants, catch vaudeville acts, and take donkey rides. They could dip (in heavy, full-coverage bathing costumes) into the chilled Atlantic surf. They could also take in the work of local “sand men”, buskers who made their living sculpting intricate scenes in the dunes just off the boardwalk and vying for tips.

Though their medium was ephemeral, these enterprising artists’ work is preserved in photographs intended for picture postcards. Their subjects — a slain soldier next to his fallen horse, Christ on the cross, lions and snakes, a buxom mermaid — were rendered in high relief, using saltwater-soaked sand. In some photographs, the artist can be seen working, scraping away in shirtsleeves and balmorals.

Execution ranged from the impressive to the crude. On the one hand, there’s Jesus with arm veins visible, and a (potentially shipwrecked) mother and child swathed in damp, translucent cloth. On the other, an elephant buckling over its cartoonishly underdeveloped legs. In all cases, the scale is impressive: life-size and then some.

The public historian Holly Metz reports that Atlantic City sand sculptors numbered in the dozens, though few of their names make it down to us today. The cast included the intrepid James J. Taylor, dressed in a suit and derby hat in photographs, who once offered a cash prize for any sand sculptor that could best him, and a number of African American artists (such as the one-armed sculptor Owen Golden), some of whom crossed the color line to sculpt on segregated beaches. Unfortunately, many surviving images of African American sand artists were re-touched to make them appear white. “A common practice, according to postcard archivists", writes Metz.

At least at first, the buskers were a welcome presence, appearing in enthusiastic local newspaper coverage as early as 1897. Later, they seem to have earned the ire of Atlantic City administrators, who began to legislate sand artists. Public ordinance put the kibosh on religious and naked figures, banned advertisements for local business, and required permits.

If trouble-making sand men are difficult to picture, their postcards do bear traces of some possibly abrasive self-promotion. Variations on the refrain “Don’t Forget the Worker”, a reminder to tip, appear often: so too do some chest-thumping lines championing the sand sculpture art form, including, underlined, “The Key-Note of All Art”.

By the early 1940s, the career was in decline. Some sand men had begun to seal their works with a cement coating, raising complaints about sand sculpting’s corruption. In 1944, Metz writes, a hurricane reworked the shorefront, destroying stretches of boardwalk and the sand men’s displays. It was then that the first generation of New Jersey sand sculpting tradition, too, went out with the tide.