The shaft still open, the machines fallen where they stood

A pit under a steep cliff. At the right a ship lies canted over with its masts and torn sails still standing; in front of it a machine has collapsed against a great riveted cylinder, its cowl hanging. A round dark shaft-mouth opens in the pale ground at the centre. To the left, lattice towers and scaffolding rise over an open floor where small crab-like Martian forms lie scattered, and birds turn in the air above. Signed at the lower right.

Henrique Alvim Corrêa (1876–1910) was born in Rio de Janeiro and settled as a young man in Belgium, where he worked at the edge of the Brussels Symbolist circle. He began drawing scenes from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds on his own initiative, and when Wells saw the portfolio he gave it his blessing — he is said to have remarked that Alvim Corrêa had done more for his book with a brush than he had with a pen. The drawings appeared in the deluxe Brussels edition published by L. Vandamme & Co in 1906: 500 numbered copies, a hundred illustrations in the text and thirty-two full plates. Corrêa died of tuberculosis four years later, at thirty-four. The plates are still the images most readers picture when they imagine Wells's Martians, and they set the pattern for a century of science-fiction art.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.