#francis coradal-cugat

[useless-catalanfacts]

Did you know that the original cover of the American novel The Great Gatsby was made by a Catalan artist?

His name was Francis Cugat (an anglicized version of his birth name Francesc Cugat), and he was brother to the famous musician Xavier Cugat. Francesc was born in 1893 in Barcelona (Catalonia), but when he was young his family migrated to Cuba and later to the USA.

He was a little-known illustrator who worked creating posters for American opera houses when he was found by F. Scott-Fitzgerald’s publisher while the author was still working on the book. The publisher sent Francis Cugat a summary of the novel and the working title “Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires”, and commissioned him to make a book cover. Francis Cugat made various sketches around the idea of a disembodied face of a flapper suspended over the New York cityscape. He sent this final version to the publisher, and both him and Fitzgerald loved it.

Fitzgerald was still working on the manuscript when he received the illustration. As his letters to the editor show, he was so pleased with the image that he intentionally edited his writing to tie it into the book. The letters don’t clearly state what parts of the book were influenced by the cover, but it's believed that the face at the cover inspired the description of the billboard of optometrist T. J. Eckleburg, and also a description of Daisy as the “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs”.

For the rest of his life, Francis Cugat continued painting and making illustrations for films and theatre, and later became a Technicolor colour consultant for more than 60 Hollywood films and as a set designer. He died in 1981. His work is little known, but his Celestial Eyes remain one of the most famous book covers of all times.