"The Ninth Life" by Jack Mann - A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950

Although he is mostly forgotten today, Henry Richard Van Dongen was a prolific artist for the science fiction pulps and digest magazines of the 1950’s. He provided both covers and interiors to the SF mags, with his first published piece appearing as the cover for the September 1949 issue of Super Science Stories. His primary market in the 1950’s was Astounding, and his work for them during that decade included nearly three dozen covers. After being absent from the field for most of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, he returned in the mid-1970’s, doing book covers for Del Rey and DAW.

This illustration is from the April 1950 issue of A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, for “The Ninth Life” by Jack Mann (a pseudonym of E. Charles Vivian), which had originally been serialized in Argosy during August 1939.