Investigation of a Cassius Marcellus Coolidge creator of “Dogs Playing Poker”

Recently we were given the assignment to reproduce a Modern Master, when we first got given this assignment, there was only one picture that came to mind “Dogs Playing Poker”.  As I live with four dogs, Doris, Joey, Angel and Jack and several other animals, I have an appreciation of anything to do with animals especially artwork.  The thought of attempting to replicate the famous Dogs playing Poker picture but with actual real dogs was an assignment I wanted to investigate further.

Dogs Playing Poker actually is a collective of sixteen oil paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.  Coolidge was born on the 12^th November 1844 in Antwerp, New York in America, he grew up on a Quaker farm.  Coolidge had the nickname of “Rash” to his friends and family as he was growing up.  Whilst he had no formal training as artist, he had a natural aptitude for drawing.  Coolidge started out drawing cartoons for his local newspaper in his twenties, and is credited with creating “Comic Foregrounds”, life sized cut-outs into which ones head was placed so as to be photographed as an amusing character, you often see these at carnivals or the seaside. 

Coolidge was a visual artist whose focus was illustration and painting, and it was for this reason he was commissioned by Brown and Bigelow (St Paul, Minnesota) to advertise cigars in 1903.  The contract was to create sixteen oil paintings over several years featuring anthropomorphized dogs, that is to say dogs with human characteristics (characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) engaging in human activities.

Although Coolidge created many work of arts till his death in January 1934 aged 89, his most famous work was still his “Dogs Playing Poker” series.  Critic Annette Ferrara describes “Dogs Playing Poker” as “indelibly burned into … the American collective-schlock subconscious … through incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera”.  As the nine oil paintings, that feature dogs sat around a card table have become derisively well known initially in the USA but also round the world as examples of mainly working class taste in home decoration.

Out of the original sixteen oil paintings that make up the collection of “Dogs Playing Poker” two seem to be the most popular

  

Waterloo                                                (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff)

A Friend in Need

After Coolidge finished this assignment, his fascination with dogs didn’t end, and in 1903 Coolidge painted dogs playing Kelly Pool (a specific type of pool game, popular in Coolidge’s time).

Kelly's Pool

Coolidge really enjoyed painting dogs with human characteristics and in 1910 he painted another oil painting on this theme entitled “Looks Like Four of a Kind”

Four Of A Kind

Coolidge did base the dog portraitures on real life dogs, the St Bernard in the paintings “Waterloo” and “A Bold Bluff” was called Captain and was owned by Theodore Lang, a florist on Fifth Avenue who was a friend of Coolidge’s.  In February 2005 the original paintings of “Waterloo” and “A Bold Bluff” were auctioned as a pair for US$590,400.  Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” has inspired many artists since, in the 1950’s Arthur Sarnoff, an American illustrator painted a series of paintings of dogs playing craps, pool and poker.