SATURN AS SEEN FROM TITAN

"The planets of our Solar System had never been accurately depicted from their satellites, through a definite visual angle. Always before it had been an 'artist's conception' ... As my knowledge of the technical side of the motion picture industry broadened I realized I could apply camera angles as used in the motion picture studio to illustrate 'travel' from satellite to satellite, showing Saturn exactly as it would look, and at the same time I could add interest by showing the inner satellites or outer ones on the far side of Saturn, as well as the planet itself in different places." —Chesley Bonestell

Chesley Bonestell first began to sketch Saturn as viewed from Titan, and other planets from other moons, around 1940 while he was working as a matte painter for Warner Bros. (Bonestell was an important contributor to Citizen Kane—among many other classics—creating the art for both the Inquirer edifice and for Xanadu.) It was with these planetary sketches, soon developed into full-scale paintings, that Bonestell made his great and lasting breakthrough – to show planets from a defined visual angle. When he did this, he introduced a human point of view and our collective human imagination was immediately switched on to the experience of space travel.

A nearly identical version of Saturn as Seen from Titan was one of the six illustrations by Bonestell published in Life magazine on 29 May 1944; the first of his space paintings to be published (Schuetz 1). As a result of this publication, Bonestell met Willy Ley, a German-American rocket expert who had fled Nazi Germany in 1935. Their collaboration, with text by Ley and pictures by Bonestell, was published in 1949 as The Conquest of Space. The Conquest of Space was both the first book illustrated by Bonestell and his most popular. It was a phenomenal best-seller. Arthur C. Clarke gave it an enthusiastic and prescient review at the time it came out: "Mr Bonestell's remarkable technique produces an effect of realism so striking that his paintings have often been mistaken for actual color photographs by those slightly unacquainted with the present status of interplanetary flight ... To many, this book will for the first time make the other planets real places, and not mere abstractions. In the years to come it is probably destined to fire many imaginations, and thereby to change many lives." Fifty years later, Clarke's prediction still rang true, The Conquest of Space "convinced an entire generation of post-World War II readers that spaceflight was possible in their lifetime. There are countless professional aerospace engineers and scientists working today who decided their careers when they saw The Conquest of Space." (Miller & Durant, p.57).

Saturn as Seen from Titan was among Bonestell's favorite creations and the 1944 version has been called both the most famous astronomical painting ever made and "the painting that launched a thousand careers" (Kim Poor). The 1944 painting is now in the collection of the Adler Planetarium. The present version of this view was painted circa 1952 as a gift for Bonestell's only child, possibly a wedding gift. It is nearly identical to the one published in 1944, which was among the first finished space paintings he completed. This version is larger by a few inches and is the one which was made into a popular print about 30 years later, introducing Bonestell to another generation.