Edition 50. Signed and numbered 4/50 in pencil.

Image size 8 x 5 15/16 inches (203 x 151 mm); sheet size 12 3/4 x 9 7/8 inches (324 x 251 mm).

A fine impression, on cream wove paper, with full margins (1 7/8 to 2 15/16 inches), in excellent condition. Ex. collection Kennedy Galleries.

Illustrator and printmaker, Francis Coradal-Cugat, was the creator of the renowned original jacket cover for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Little is known about Francis Cugat (or F. Coradal-Cugat), the artist responsible for the most eloquent jacket in American literary history: he was born in Spain in 1893 and raised in Cuba; he was brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cugat; he worked in Hollywood as a designer for Douglas Fairbanks; he had a one-man New York show in 1942... Cugat’s painting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the most celebrated and widely disseminated jacket art in twentieth-century American literature, and perhaps of all time. After appearing on the first printing in 1925, it was revived more than a half-century later for the “Scribner Library” paperback edition in 1979; more than two decades (and several million copies) later it may be seen in classrooms of virtually every high school and college throughout the country. Like the novel it embellishes, this Art Deco tour-de-force has firmly established itself as a classic.”
–Charles Scribner III

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