Chesley Knight Bonestell Jr. (January 1, 1888 – June 11, 1986) was an American painter, designer, and illustrator, best known for his realistic-looking paintings of space exploration, including future spacecraft and scenes set on moons and planets in the Solar System. His work helped inspire the American space program and appeared in popular magazines and books from the 1940s into the 1970s. He is considered one of the founders of "space art" for scientific illustration and his style has been influential in science fiction art, illustration, and cinema.Chesley Bonestell (Photograph by Cedric Braun.) Chesley Bonestell Memorial Lecture Series, Each year, the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy presents a lecture for the general public supported by funds from the Chesley Bonestell Memorial Lecture Endowment. – Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy
Physicist Sidney Perkowitz summarized his historic reputation as: "Chesley Bonestell portrayed planets, stars, and spacecraft with stunning, near-photographic realism. Collaborating with experts like rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, Bonestell's renditions combined the best scientific and engineering knowledge of the time, and scientific exactness, with artistic imagination". According to American space policy expert Howard E. McCurdy: "No artist had more impact on the emerging popular culture of space in America than Chesley Bonestell. Through his visual images, he stimulated the interest of a generation of Americans and showed how space travel would be accomplished". Noted astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan put his artwork in personal terms: "I didn't know what other worlds looked like until I saw Bonestell's paintings of the solar system".Carl Sagan quote
Bonestell's artwork from the 1940s through the 1950s into the early 1960s, along with his innovative techniques and visualization skills, have led many artists and scholars to dub Chesley Bonestell "the father of modern space art" for his pioneering role.
Early life and education Bonestell (pronounced BONN-e-stell) was born January 1, 1888, in San Francisco, California, to Chesley Knight Bonestell and his wife, Jovita ( Ferrer). Jovita was a daughter of Manuel Y. Ferrer, a Mexican musician.
Chesley attended Clement Grammar School, Dickensen's Academy, and St. Ignatius College Preparatory, and George Bates University School. After graduating in 1904, he worked for his grandfather, Louis H. Bonestell, at the Bonestell Paper Company. For the next three years, he attended evening classes at the Hopkins Art Institute.
Career His first astronomical painting was done in 1905. After seeing Saturn through the telescope at San Jose's Lick Observatory, he rushed home to paint what he had seen. The painting was destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. Between 1915 and 1918, he exhibited lithographs in the 4th and 7th annual exhibitions of the California Society of Etchers (now the California Society of Printmakers) in San Francisco.
Bonestell enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City in 1907, adopting an architecture major. Dropping out in June 1910, he worked as a renderer and designer for several of the leading architectural firms of the time, including the firm of Willis Polk, "The Man Who Rebuilt San Francisco."
Bonestell moved to England in 1920, where he rendered architectural subjects for the Illustrated London News. While in England, he met British artist Scriven Bolton, who was an early pioneer of space art. He returned to New York in 1926. While with William van Alen, he and Warren Straton designed the Art Deco façade of the Chrysler Building as well as its distinctive eagles. During this same period, he designed the Plymouth Rock Memorial, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, the New York Central Building, Manhattan office and apartment buildings and several state capitols.Chesley Bonestell Chronology , By Melvin H. Schuetz, 1999, uPublish.com Parkland Florida,
Returning to the West Coast, he prepared illustrations of the chief engineer's plans for the Golden Gate Bridge for the benefit of funders. In the late 1930s he moved to Hollywood, where he worked (without screen credit) as a special effects artist, creating matte paintings for films, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Magazines, books, motion pictures, public artworks Drawing on his motion picture experience, Bonestell realized that he could combine what he had learned about camera angles, miniature modeling, and painting techniques with his lifelong interest in astronomy. His inspiration to create astronomical paintings would come as well from his encounters with Scriven Bolton in the 1920s (whose work he sometimes criticized) and perhaps even more so from the French artist-astronomer Lucien Rudaux, who had created scientifically based paintings with imagined views from the surfaces of moons and planets in the 1930s. Bonestell would add elements of drama along with a more photographic-style precision in the details. The result was a series of paintings of Saturn as seen from several of its moons that was published in Life in 1944.Saturn as seen from Titan and other moons, Chesley Bonestell "Solar System: It Is Modeled in Miniature by Saturn, Its Rings and Nine Moons" (May 29, 1944) Life, Vol. 16, No. 22, Pgs. 78—80 Nothing like these had ever been seen before: they looked as though photographers had been sent into space. His painting "Saturn as Seen from Titan"Saturn as Seen from Titan by Chesley Bonestell (1944) is perhaps the most famous astronomical landscape ever, and is nicknamed "the painting that launched a thousand careers." It was constructed with a combination of clay models, photographic tricks and various painting techniques (Titan has a thick haze; such a view is probably not possible in reality). Bonestell followed up the sensation these paintings created by publishing more paintings in many leading national magazines. These and others were eventually collected in the best-selling book The Conquest of Space (1949), produced in collaboration with author Willy Ley.
Beyond their technical brilliance, Bonestell's evocative images could convey a poetic sense of wonder at scenes and vistas humans had yet to experience directly. Bonestell's space scenes commonly included explorers in spacesuits seen as tiny figures in vast and strange extraterrestrial landscapes, viewed from an elevated vantage point. This artistic formula echoed 19th century American romantic landscape painters (commonly referred to as the Hudson River School), who often added barely noticed humans in the foregrounds of sweeping vistas of mountains, valleys, and canyons set in the American wilderness, intended to inspire awe.
Bonestell's last work in Hollywood was contributing special effects art and technical advice to the seminal science fiction films produced by George Pal in the 1950s, including Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, and Conquest of Space.
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein described working with Bonestell on the 1950 motion picture Destination Moon in the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, noting: "Mr. Bonestell knows more about the surface appearance of the Moon than any other living man". Bonestell produced the matte paintings and lunar landscape background on the set, after persuading Heinlein to change the crater landing site from Aristarchus to the more northern Harpalus so Earth could be in view near the horizon in the background.Destination Moon (1950) lunar landscape panorama painted by Chesley Bonestell (video) However, Bonestell was unhappy with the inaccurate "mudcracks" on the lunar surface added by the art director Ernst Fegté to suggest greater depth and perspective within the limited size of the set.Hickman, Gail Morgan. The Films of George Pal. New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1977. . Heinlein and Bonestell worked out the original design for the single-stage atomic Moon rocket Luna based on the German V-2 rocket with added wings and large slanting landing struts at the base. Ernst Fegté modified Bonestell's design to remove the pair of upper wings and convert the landing struts into four enlarged tail fins to serve as wing-like landing supports on a more slender and tapered body shape. (Bonestell's design for a winged rocket with landing struts later appeared in the non-Pal 1951 low-budget science fiction film Flight to Mars, produced by Walter Mirisch.) Bonestell was interviewed on the set of Destination Moon during an episode of the news and culture program City at Night on KTLA television in Los Angeles in October 1949, which also highlighted his artwork in the recently published book Conquest of Space by Willy Ley.
Bonestell's work on the 1951 When Worlds Collide included the design of the spaceship model for the "space ark" that humans use to escape the destruction of Earth. The film's rushed production toward the end, however, meant that the rather cartoonish-looking painted landscapes used to depict the planet Zyra that the survivors see after they land were only early sketches and not the much more realistic finished work with miniatures that Bonestell had intended to provide.
Of particular note, Bonestell created the paintings for the partly animated prologue sequence in the 1953 The War of the Worlds, which depicted a Martian city with canalsMartian city with canals, matte painting by Bonestell from The War of the Worlds (1953) and views of the other planets of the solar system (except Venus) as they were understood at the time, including an inaccurate "volcanic" surface on Jupiter. The scenes were narrated by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who explained why only Earth seemed suitable to the Martians for a new home as their own planet reached exhaustion. Less memorably, Bonestell's moonscape art appeared (without permission) in the campy, low-budget Cat-Women of the Moon in 1953."The film's credits acknowledge the use of Chesley Bonestell's moonscapes, but he was otherwise not involved in the production of the film." Cat-Women of the Moon. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Bonestell and Willy Ley were consultants on Pal's 1955 film Conquest of Space about the first human expedition to Mars, which aimed to be as scientifically accurate as possible based on then current ideas and knowledge. The winged spaceraft and orbiting wheel-like space station miniature models were based on Bonestell's earlier artwork from Wernher von Braun's ideas. However, Bonestell's Martian landscapes designed to resemble Arizona-like desert vistas were not used in the final film because they did not look "unearthly" enough. Bonestell recalled the unwelcome changes: "When I went on the stage of Mars with Dr Robert Richardson from Palomar Observatory, what did I see? Red sawdust all over the stage, with hunks of black coal and great big pieces of glass that they'd gotten out of some bathroom."
Beginning with the October 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction,October 1947 Astounding Science Fiction cover by Bonestell Bonestell painted more than 60 cover illustrations for science fiction magazines, primarily The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in the 1950s through 1970s. Bonestell admitted that he had little personal interest in reading science fiction, preferring history and factual scientific content, but was happy for the income his cover art brought in. He also illustrated many fiction and non-fiction book covers.