Pioneers of the Final Frontier: Space Art from Victorian Times to World War II

Abstract

The first example of true astronomical art – the first time that an effort had been made to depict a scene from the surface of another world with scientific accuracy (or at least according to the best science available at the time) – can be precisely dated to 1865 in a novel by Jules Verne. Until then, the development of space art had moved fairly slowly. There were depictions of space flight, such as the art that accompanied Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657), but these were clearly fantasy, with no real attempt by either the authors or artists to base their descriptions even on the limited scientific knowledge of the time. There were also observation-based depictions of the Moon and Sun as seen through a telescope, but those images were faithful reporting of what could be seen, not what could only be imagined.