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Francis Coradal-Cugat
'Richard Wagner' — 1920s Portrait of the Composer

c. 1928

$350
£268.78
€308.02
CA$492.71
A$551.95
CHF 287.62
MX$6,732.63
NOK 3,654.93
SEK 3,446.34
DKK 2,299.01

About the Item

Francis Coradal-Cugat, 'Richard Wagner', etching, c. 1928. Signed, titled, and numbered ‘2/50’ in pencil with the artist’s inked fingerprint beneath his signature. A fine, richly inked impression, on cream wove paper, with full margins (1 7/8 to 2 15/16 inches), in excellent condition. Archivally matted to museum standards. Image size 8 x 5 15/16 inches (203 x 151 mm); sheet size 13 3/4 x 9 7/8 inches (349 x 251 mm). Provenance: Ex. collection Kennedy Galleries, New York. ABOUT THE ARTIST "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 Francis Cugat, also known as Francisco Coradal-Cougat (1893 – 1981), was a painter and graphic designer whose most famous work was the original 1925 dust jacket for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From the mid-1940s, he was a Technicolor consultant on more than 60 Hollywood films. Francis Cugat was born in Barcelona in 1893. The Cugat family emigrated to Cuba in 1903. Cugat studied at the academy at Rheims and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became known as a portrait painter in France, South America, and Cuba before coming to the United States. Cugat applied to Cleofonte Campanini, musical director of the Chicago Opera, for the commission to paint poster portraits of the Chicago Opera Association stars. Between 1915 and 1918, he created distinctive, stylized theatre cards for several opera personalities, including Lucien Muratore, Rosa Raisa, and Giacomo Rimini. Cugat's earliest film work includes Robert Z. Leonard's now-lost 1922 film Fascination, for which he was retained to assure the authenticity of the set design. "It is one of the rules of theatrical presentation that none of the real-life incongruities of background will be reproduced in a picture", Leonard said. "So we have sought to make each bit of furniture, each painting on the walls, all of the household utensils, all of the café settings, and so on, thoroughly 'Spanish'. And Señor Cugat is the authority for the fact that we have succeeded." Cugat moved to Hollywood in 1925 and, for many years, worked as a set designer in Hollywood. His work included sets for the Douglas Fairbanks motion pictures Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), and The Gaucho (1927). He was credited for technical work on 68 Hollywood films. Cugat continued to pursue his fine art career and had a 1942 show in New York, well after his famous work for The Great Gatsby.
  • Creator:
    Francis Coradal-Cugat (Spanish)
  • Creation Year:
    c. 1928
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 8 in (20.32 cm)Width: 5.94 in (15.09 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Myrtle Beach, SC
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: 1036951stDibs: LU53238084892

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