Dogs Playing Poker

The series of oil-on-canvas paintings universally known as “Dogs Playing Poker” was created by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844 – 1934),

Like Michelangelo’s “David”, Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”, Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, the paintings became immediately recognisable to people of all ages and backgrounds, including those who didn’t readily admit to enjoying art – especially the most frequently reproduced of the bunch, “A Friend in Need” (1903), so named because – unbeknownst to the other players – the bulldog in the foreground is slipping an ace to his partner.

Over the years, the “Dogs Playing Poker” series has infiltrated our popular culture, with references to the work popping up everywhere from a Snoop Dogg music video to the beloved Disney Pixar film Up.

In an episode of the ‘80s sitcom Cheers, Sam the bartender gushes that he notices something new every time he looks at one of the paintings; the line gets a knowing chuckle from the live studio audience.

Coolidge wasn’t the first to paint anthropomorphised animals – they were always easy fodder for comedy – but it was his good luck to become a commercial artist at a time when American businesses were beginning to invest heavily in advertising.

Between 1880 and 1920, the total advertising expenditures by American companies surged from $200 million to $3 billion, and at the heart of this revolution were artists, whose images had to be cute, weird, or otherwise memorable enough to turn consumers’ heads.

Raised in the small town of Philadelphia in upstate New York, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge moved to Rochester in 1873, where he tried his hand as a druggist, a street address painter, and a cartoonist. Though he lacked any formal training as an artist, Coolidge seems to have had an intuitive grasp of what made people laugh and what kinds of images they wanted to see.

Many art historians credit him with inventing “comic foregrounds,” those plywood pictures with a cut-out hole for a head, allowing passersby to pretend they’re bodybuilders or mermaids. So, even if he’d never painted a single pooch, Coolidge’s place in the kitsch canon would be secure.

His knack for crafting playfully surreal images culminated in his magnum opus, the absurdist canine series for which he’s best remembered.

His earliest paintings of dogs playing poker, dating back to the 1870s, decorated cigar boxes and served as a way for tobacco companies to distinguish themselves from their near-identical competitors. But it wasn’t until 1903, when Coolidge signed a contract with the Minnesota-based promotional firm Brown & Bigelow, that his success was assured.

Coolidge went on to create a total of 16 dog paintings, including “A Friend in Need”, for the company, and the images were endlessly reproduced in calendars advertising cigars. These calendars proved to be massively successful, and Coolidge’s art found its way into millions of homes.

Coolidge painted dogs ballroom dancing and playing football and baseball, but it was the one-two punch of canines and poker that’s proven most enduring.

When Coolidge died in 1934, the obituary in the local paper read, “He painted many pictures of dogs.” And how!

The artist himself remains all but unknown today, a noble, neglected pioneer in the proud 20th-century tradition of animal art. Meanwhile, his paintings of dogs playing poker routinely go for five or six figures; In 2005, the originals of “A Bold Bluff” and “A Waterloo” were bought (as a pair) for $590,400 and in 2015, “Poker Game” – one of the earliest installations in the series – sold for $658,000 at Sotheby’s.

The Paintings

• A Bachelor’s Dog – reading the mail
• A Bold Bluff – playing poker
• Breach of Promise Suit – testifying in court
• A Friend in Need – playing poker
• His Station and Four Aces – playing poker
• New Year’s Eve in Dogville – ballroom dancing
• One to Tie Two to Win – baseball
• Pinched with Four Aces – playing poker, illegal gambling
• Poker Sympathy – playing poker
• Post Mortem – playing poker
• The Reunion – smoking and drinking
• Riding the Goat – Masonic initiation
• Sitting up with a Sick Friend – playing poker
• Stranger in Camp – playing poker, camping
• Ten Miles to a Garage – travel, car trouble, teamwork
• A Waterloo – playing poker