Who illustrated the first-edition dust jacket of The Great Gatsby?

Francis Cugat illustrated the first-edition dust jacket of The Great Gatsby.

Cugat’s Art Deco design, usually called Celestial Eyes, shows a disembodied flapper-like face with enormous eyes above a dark, glittering cityscape. Charles Scribner’s Sons commissioned the relatively little-known artist while Fitzgerald was still working on the novel. The cover became one of the most famous images in American literary publishing.

The artwork mattered beyond decoration. Fitzgerald admired Cugat’s preliminary designs and told his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he had incorporated elements of the image into the book. Readers and scholars have often connected the giant eyes with the billboard of the optometrist T. J. Eckleburg in the Valley of Ashes, although the cover also evokes Daisy Buchanan and the novel’s themes of desire, spectacle, and illusion.

Another curious detail is that Cugat’s original painting was long believed lost. It was later found in a trash can at Scribner’s and donated to Princeton University Libraries. Cugat, born Francisco Coradal-Cougat in Barcelona, never became as famous as his cover.