One man climbing, and the whole night behind him

A man in shirtsleeves and dark breeches hauls himself up a steep bank, both hands locked around a fallen branch and one boot braced, his face turned out of the picture towards the viewer — the only lit thing in the sheet apart from the ground he is climbing towards. A high dark wall runs up behind him with a small bright grid of lighted windows near the top, and a bare thorn thicket catches the light at the 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.