Charles Schneeman

 Cover for E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s ‘Skylark of Space’ (1946)

Prolific American artist Charles Schneeman (1912–1972) produced a great deal of work for newspapers and magazines, of all kinds; but it is for his work on Astounding, providing black-and-white interior illustrations to a variety of authors' works, for which he is remembered (he also produced some notable cover art). For the last installment of E E ‘Doc’ Smith's Grey Lensman, originally serialised in Campbell's Astounding in 1939-40, Schneeman produced what Brian Aldiss [Science Fiction Art, 1975] somewhat dithyrhambically, calls ‘one of the most famous of all sf illustrations’: Smith's hero, Kimball Kinnison, striding along, accompanied by his strange Alien allies.



That might over-state matters, but Schneeman's command of form and line was impressively direct and vigorous. This, from the same Astounding serialisation of Smith's novel:


Schneeman's chops as an illustrator are on display in his cover-art for the first volume issue of Smith's Skylark of Space (at the head of this post): a compartmentalised two-tone image, in which scientist Dick Seaton is shown tinkering in his laboratory. In the novel, Seaton discovers a new element ‘X’ which in turn, he realises, is able to power an interstellar drive. In terms of cover-art, Schneeman has shown the various glass tubes and retorts containing elements of the story, as if Seaton has distilled himself down to a man with a pistol, who is then boiled and distilled into the shape of spaceship flying past Saturn, which in turn becomes the face of a beautiful woman. Not logical according to the remit of chemical science, but expressive of the plot of the novel. A first edition of Smith's novel, with dust jacket, is presently on sale for £1240.34, including postage and packing. A snip!

Here, illustrative of his process, are two more Schneeman artworks. First, an interior illustration to Robert Moore Williams's ‘The Red Death of Mars’ (Astounding July 1940), in which human explorers on Mars are attacked by malign gaseous balls. Schneeman sketches the image, pencil on paper:


The challenge is to make the balls stand out, as if glowing (so described in the story). To that end, Schneeman inks what amounts to a photographic negative of what will be the final image:


The image reproduced in Astounding is an actual photographic-negative of this composition, highlighting the brightness of the Martian balls, against the night sky, and without losing them against the backdrop of the human spaceship:


Second, Schneeman was commissioned to provide cover art for the May 1938 issue of Astounding, in which Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time was being serialised. He started with a sketch, presently in the collection of University of California Davis Library:


This he then redrew on card, and coloured in water-colour with added pastel:



 A science-fictional reworking of the idea of the siren or mermaid, tempting mortal man into her beguiling-looking craft, despite the disapprobation of his female companion. This is how the image was set up for the Astounding print run: coal-tar dyes losing much of the vibrancy of coloration of the original:









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