The Story You Don't Know About Dogs Playing Poker
Quick – name three famous paintings that most people would recognize.
The Mona Lisa?
Starry Night?
How about... Dogs Playing Poker?
It may not rank as highbrow art, but a lot of people would recognize the painting showing a table full of canines playing cards.
But where did it come from?
I was curious…
It turns out Dogs Playing Poker is not a single painting – it’s actually a series of 18 paintings.
And while many recognize the art, few know the artist – Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
Coolidge was born on September 18, 1844, in Antwerp, New York, and raised by Quaker farmers in Philadelphia, New York. He left the family farm in the early 1860s and bounced around the northeastern United States and Europe.
He had a variety of jobs in his 20s and 30s, including running a drug store, founding a bank, and painting street signs. He also worked as a writer and cartoonist, once penning a ‘comic opera about a mosquito epidemic in New Jersey.’
His creativity was recognized in 1874, when he received a patent for “a process for taking a photograph or other picture of a person’s head large on a miniature body.’ That would be those tall, wooden cut-outs you see at fairs that allow people to pretend they’re bodybuilders or mermaids. One of Coolidge’s designs for a cut-out was ‘Fat Man in a Bathing Suit.’
Here’s a drawing from Coolidge’s patent application.
When he was nearly 60 years old, Coolidge was commissioned to create artwork for Minnesota-based promotional firm Brown & Bigelow, and that’s when he created a series of dog paintings that would soon hit the mainstream.
In 1903, Brown & Bigelow used 16 of Coolidge’s dog paintings on wall calendars and cigar boxes (the paintings helped distinguish one cigar brand from another). The calendars proved to be especially popular, and Coolidge’s dog paintings could be found in millions of homes across the country.
While the paintings show dogs doing human activities, only 11 include poker games. The others feature dogs in scenarios like dancing, playing baseball, and having car trouble.
Despite their ubiquity, Coolidge and his dogs didn’t get much respect from the art world. Critics largely viewed the series as a joke, and considered them kitsch. Even Coolidge’s daughter Marcella wasn’t a fan of his work.
In 2002, the New York Times interviewed the 92-year-old Marcella Coolidge, and asked her about her father’s work.
She replied bluntly: “I didn’t like it.”
But Coolidge’s paintings have stayed in the public’s mind, and Dogs Playing Poker has appeared on an array of merchandise over the years – from T-shirts to coffee mugs.
The paintings have remained a fixture in pop culture and been referred to in TV shows for decades (from Cheers and The Simpsons to Parks and Recreation and Family Guy) as well as Pixar films, video games, and music videos.
In 2002, it appeared Coolidge’s work was finally going to be celebrated by the art world when the director of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia issued a press release claiming he was trying to acquire the series of oil-on-canvas paintings universally known as “Dogs Playing Poker” (1903-1910).
But it was an April Fool’s joke.
Despite the snobbery, Coolidge’s paintings have fetched a fair penny.
In 2005, two paintings from the series, Waterloo and A Bold Bluff (1903), were predicted to sell for $30-50,000 at auction.
But an anonymous bidder paid a whopping $590,400 – setting a record for Coolidge works.
That record was broken 10 years later when the first painting in Coolidge’s series, Poker Game (1894) sold for $658,000 at Sotheby’s.
The auction catalogue excerpted a 1973 article from American Heritage:
“Coolidge’s poker-faced style is still engaging today … His details of expression, clothing, and furniture are precise. Uncannily, the earnest animals resemble people we all know.”
But the most popular painting in the series was Coolidge’s A Friend in Need. It shows a bulldog in the foreground secretly slipping an ace to his partner, while his competitors give side-glances around the table.
The original has never been up for sale, but it’s thought to be worth millions of dollars.
While no one knows what inspired Coolidge to paint the series, some have suggested that Dogs Playing Poker were deeper than people realized.
They speculate it was a satirical series intended to mock the upper class in their excesses and attitudes.
And Coolidge’s paintings are similar in composition to the poker paintings Paul Cézanne and Georges de La Tour created (where they used people, Coolidge used dogs).
Despite the success of the paintings, Coolidge was relatively unknown during his life.
When he died in 1934, the obituary in the local paper read:
“He painted many pictures of dogs.”
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