Jules Verne's Around the Moon — Bayard & Neuville Engraving, c.1870
Created during the height of Jules Verne's literary fame, this engraving illustrates 'Around the Moon' (Autour de la Lune, 1870), Verne's sequel to 'From the Earth to the Moon.' At a time when space travel existed only in imagination, Verne's bullet-shaped projectile became an iconic vision of the future. The scene depicts a figure floating in the void of space outside the cylindrical capsule, a porthole revealing observers within — a breathtakingly prescient image of spacewalking, decades before the concept was formalized.
Restrained by Victorian engraving conventions, the image nonetheless delivers a quietly stunning vision — a human figure tumbling in the starfield beside a massive bullet-capsule is genuinely eerie and conceptually ahead of its time. Not flashy, but hauntingly prescient.
