Who designed the original cover art of The Great Gatsby?

Francis Cugat designed the original cover art for The Great Gatsby.

Cugat’s Art Deco dust jacket, known as Celestial Eyes, was created for the novel’s 1925 first edition. It shows a stylized woman’s face suspended over a dark, glittering cityscape, with large luminous eyes and a green tear. The image has become one of the most recognizable covers in literary history.

The cover was not merely packaging. Fitzgerald saw an early version while he was still finishing the manuscript and told Maxwell Perkins that he had incorporated Cugat’s imagery into the novel. Readers and scholars have linked the eyes to the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, although the cover’s imagery may also evoke Daisy Buchanan and the novel’s atmosphere of longing and spectacle.

Cugat was a Spanish-born painter and graphic designer, and Celestial Eyes was his only book cover for Scribner’s. The original painting was later recovered and is preserved in the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University.