skyandtelescope.com • SEPTEMBER 2019 63
rolling,” Miller says. “He looked through a telescope at the
limb of the Moon and saw the mountains in profi le, all nice
and rolly. Bonestell had these books, but I think he made a
wise decision to paint the Moon’s mountains the way he did
because, frankly, who would want to go to the Moon if it
looked like South Dakota?”
In 1920, Bonestell and his second wife, opera singer
Ruby Helder, moved to England, where Bonestell took a job
with the Illustrated London News. He returned to the United
States in 1926 and joined architect William Van Alen in
designing the Chrysler Building (its famous gargoyles were
a Bonestell fl ourish). Soon after his return to California,
he was hired by Joseph Strauss to render the designs of the
Golden Gate Bridge. His illustrations delighted city offi cials
and the public alike, and were instrumental in ensuring the
massive bridge’s construction.
With a letter of introduction from Van Alen in hand,
Bonestell next took his talents to Hollywood, where he
quickly became one of the fi lm industry’s premiere matte
painters, making an impressive $1,100 a week. He created
the matte painting of the massive Notre Dame cathedral
featured in the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre
Dame, and worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane
(producing the matte painting for Kane’s palatial estate,
Xanadu) and The Magnifi cent Ambersons.
It was producer George Pal, however, who made the best
use of Bonestell’s skills. Aware of Bonestell’s astronomical
paintings, he hired the artist to create realistic planetscapes
and other pieces for Destination Moon, When Worlds Col-
lide, The War of the Worlds, and Conquest of Space, which was
based in part on the book of the same title written by Willy
Ley, with illustrations by Bonestell. It has been rumored
that Bonestell also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey. This
is untrue, though Michael Benson reports in Space Odys-
sey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a
Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster, 2018) that director Stanley
Kubrick turned to the works of Bonestell, Ludeˇk Pešek, and
others for inspiration on how to depict cosmic immensity.
In A Brush with the Future, Douglas Trumbull, special photo-
graphic effects supervisor on 2001: A Space Odyssey, details
how the look of the Moon’s surface became a bone of conten-
tion between him and Kubrick. Trumbull thought the MoonuOTHER WORLD VIEWS (Top) Perhaps following Rudaux’s lead, Bon-
estell presented solar system bodies from unusual perspectives. In 1944,
Life magazine published a series of his paintings that showed Saturn as
it might appear from its various moons. The scene here shows the view
from Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite.uRETURN TRIP (Middle) The cover of the October 1960 issue of The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction featured a reprint of Bonestell’s
1959 painting “Unloading Empty Fuel Tanks on the Moon.”uSOOTHSAYER IN SPACE (Bottom) Bonestell’s 1949 depiction of
the surface of Pluto seems eerily prescient. The jagged, snow-covered
features he envisioned aren’t so distant from the giant ice mountains
CH revealed by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015.
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