Benjamin Goodwin Seielstad
Benjamin Goodwin Seielstad (December 23, 1886 – July 1, 1960) was an American painter and illustrator who often signed his work as B. G. Seielstad. He was born in Lake Wilson, Minnesota, to Gudbrund Julius Seielstad and Carrie Goodwin Benson. His parents had moved to the United States from Norway. He married Nathalie Pomeroy around 1912, and they had a daughter, Lucile, born in Los Angeles in 1914.
Seielstad studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked alongside artists like Jean Mannheim. He began his career as an illustrator for newspapers, including the Los Angeles Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, and later for the New York Daily News, New York World, and the Philadelphia Examiner. He claimed his first job was covering the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
In the 1930s, he created many illustrations for Popular Science Monthly. He produced both technical drawings, such as a cutaway of a pocket watch (1931), and imaginative pieces about the future, like a futuristic city based on ideas by R. H. Wilenski (1934) and an automatic freeway (1938). One article, How The World Will End (1939), gave him wide freedom to present his own concepts, including a scene of a giant meteor approaching New York.
By 1940 Seielstad was working for Life magazine. He described loving a candid-camera style to help him draw, saying he used the reader’s eye like a camera to unfold a scene in his pictures. He also compared the events of World War II to his early earthquake assignment.
Benjamin Goodwin Seielstad died in Inglewood, California, on July 1, 1960, after a long illness, at the age of 73.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:33 (CET).