Celestial Eyes

Common card · No. 275668

Celestial Eyes is a 1924 Art Deco painting by Spanish painter Francis Cugat. It is preserved in the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University Library. The painting was commissioned as the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel about the contemporary Jazz Age, one of the most celebrated works of American literature. Celestial Eyes depicts a lightly delineated woman's face, garbed in a flapper's turban. The sultry eyes and mouth are depicted vividly, suspended in a blue night sky over the Coney Island amusement park and the lights of New York City. The irises of the eyes are in the form of reclining nude women, and a green light appears as a tear falling from the right eye. Fitzgerald rewrote portions of the book after seeing drafts of the cover, to incorporate its imagery into the novel. The painting has been praised for its abstractness and mysterious charm, and is considered one of the most recognizable cover illustrations in literature. The face is understood...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Francis Cugat (1893–1981), Public domain