Chesley Knight Bonestell, Jr. (1888-1986) was an American painter, illustrator, and matte painter widely regarded as the father of modern astronomical art. Trained as an architect at Columbia University, he contributed to landmark buildings (the Chrysler Building, visual effects for the Golden Gate Bridge) before working in Hollywood as a matte painter on films such as Citizen Kane (1941) and The War of the Worlds (1953). From 1944 onward, his planetary landscapes, first published in Life, captured the American imagination through their near-photographic realism. His collaboration with Willy Ley on The Conquest of Space (1949), and later with Wernher von Braun on the Collier's space series (1952-1954), shaped Western space imagery for decades, all the way down to Kubrick's cinema. He continued painting space scenes until his death in Carmel in 1986.