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From the lighter side of the poker-news beat this Sunday comes the tail… err, tale… of the recent auction of one of the nine original “Dogs Playing Poker” series of oil paintings done in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, an ertswhile inventor and painter who achieved lasting fame from his decades’ worth of depicting dogs acting out the roles of humans in various Victorian and post-Victorian scenes. One of Coolidge’s paintings, “Poker Game,” brought $658,000 in a Sotheby’s art auction held last week.
- The legendary painting series Dogs Playing Poker was the vision of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, known to some as the “Michelangelo of the dog world”. Although some might say that Coolidge’s style isn’t “serious” enough, his masterpieces are now some of the most iconic examples of quintessential American artwork.
- This painting is the first in a series of two, so you will need to look at the final episode, Waterloo, to discover the ending. Painted sometime before February of 1909. Cassius Coolidge originally titled this painting Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing, but Brown & Bigelow’s marketers renamed it to its current form.
- Jan 31, 2017 - Original Antique 1930s 'Dogs Playing Poker' Print by C.M. Coolidge for Sale.
Coolidge’s works could never be considered high art, but they’ve been a part of the pop-culture scene for a century, being iconic in their own right. The “Poker Game” painting (right) isn’t the most famous of the nine known “Dogs Playing Poker” group crafted by Coolidge; that’s instead likely “A Friend in Need” (depicted below). They aren’t really a formal group on their own, but were instead part of a larger collection of 16 of Coolidge’s paintings of dogs that he allowed to be used for a set of calendars first produced in 1903 by Brown and Bigelow for promotional purposes. Brown and Bigelow later became known for a separate series of Boy Scouts calendars that often featured the artwork of Norman Rockwell.
Wrote Sotheby’s, in marketing the painting for its auction:
It was after a trip to Europe in 1873 that he turned up in Rochester, New York, as the portraitist of dogs whose life-style mirrored the successful middle-class humans of his time. Coolidge’s first customers were cigar companies, who printed copies of his paintings for giveaways. His fortunes rose when he signed a contract with the printers Brown & Bigelow, who turned out hundreds of thousands of copies of his dog-genre subjects as advertising posters, calendars, and prints.
“Coolidge’s poker-faced style is still engaging today. His dogs fit with amazing ease into such human male phenomena as the all-night card game, the commuter train, and the ball park. His details of expression, clothing, and furniture are precise. Uncannily, the earnest animals resemble people we all know, causing distinctions of race, breed, and color to vanish and evoking the sentiment on an old Maryland gravestone: MAJOR Born a Dog Died a Gentleman” (“A Man’s Life,” American Heritage, February 1973, p. 56).
The fact that the garish but iconic work of Coolidge could fetch such a princely sum was guaranteed to cause the requisite art-snob crowd to complain, as Jezebel.com noted in a piece that predicted some “existential panic” might occur. Okay, Coolidge wasn’t Van Gogh, we get it. Yet paintings sometimes achieve value for reasons other than their inherent quality, and so it is with Coolidge’s dogs.
Original Poker Dogs Painting Portraits
Matter of fact, it wasn’t even the first time that his “Dogs Playing Poker” works brought such lofty sums. Back in 2005, two other Coolidge pieces, “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo: Two,” sold together as a set for $590,000. The two paintings depict the before-and-after states of a big poker hand and have, since their creation, been a natural art pair.
The $658,000 for “Poker Game,” which may well have been Coolidge’s first dogs-playing-poker work, is likely the current record for a Coolidge work. But if “A Friend in Need” (right) ever went up for sale, this writer predicts it’d fetch over a million. That’s the most iconic of Coolidge’s paintings, even if admittedly looks better in low-res ultraviolet inks, smeared across a swath of cheap velvet.
If you want to read a great history of Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings, there’s none better than the piece Martin Harris, a/k/a “Short Stacked Shamus,” did at PokerNews back in 2008. I was the editor there back then, and I created that poker-themed takeoff on Andy Warhol’s iconic “Four Marilyns” work, the better to illustrate the underlying theme.
Beauty, as with value, is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes the things that end up having the most value to humans violate those existential artistic ideals. Warhol’s original “Four Marilyns” piece sold for over $38 million at auction a couple of years back, and it’s not even the most expensive Warhol work. $38 million would buy an awful lot of soup cans actually filled with soup, after all.
Such examples abound. Just a couple of weeks ago, a guitar once stolen from the late John Lennon brought $2.41 million at auction. You could have had Princess Leia‘s gold bikini from “The Empire Strikes Back,” had you been there and gone just a little higher than the $96,000 winning bid. And here’s one to wonder on: Earlier this year, the 16-page manuscript of the lyrics as written by Don McLean for his hit “American Pie” sold for $1.2 million. Great song, but really?
Thousands and thousands of such pop-culture collectibles have brought similarly high prices in recent years. The prices for the Coolidge “Dogs Playing Poker” originals really aren’t extraordinary given all of that. So let’s raise the woof a bit for some iconic, admittedly cheesy poker art, which somehow still fits in with all the rest.
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A Friend in Need 1903 C.M.Coolidge
Dogs Playing Poker Original Painting Value
When it comes to the world of art, poker isn’t just one of the many games available atbetsafe.com/en/casino – it’s also the theme of an iconic collection of paintings. Dogs Playing Poker by the American artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge started life in 1894, when Coolidge painted the first image in the series, Poker Game. The oil painting depicts four bespectacled St Bernard dogs, sitting around a poker table, with cards and cigars clamped in their paws.
It might not be a ‘serious’ work of art, but it’s certainly fetched a serious price. In 2015, Poker Game was sold through the art dealer Sotheby’s for a staggering$658,000! (For context, that’s more than six times the price at which an original sketch by the famous portraitist John Singer Sargent was recently sold).
Over the years, Dogs Playing Poker 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. So, what’s the story behind these iconic paintings? This article will guide you through Coolidge’s collection and explain why these poker-playing dogs continue to entertain us.
How many paintings are in the collection?
Dogs Playing Poker is the collective title for a series of 18 paintings. The first, Poker Game, was self-standing for almost ten years, until the Minnesota-based publishing company Brown & Bigelow commissioned Coolidge to create 16 oil paintings to advertise cigars in 1903. Of these 16, nine feature dogs playing poker – in the remaining seven, they enjoy other (distinctly dog-unfriendly) activities such as ballroom dancing, appearing in court, and reading the mail.
The collection was completed in 1910, when Coolidge painted Looks Like Four Of A Kind and brought the total number of artworks to 18.
How were the paintings received?
Original Poker Dogs Painting Pictures
The fact that 16 of the paintings were originally created as advertisements means they occupy a strange position in the art world. Much as Andy Warhol would challenge us, over 50 years later, to consider the lines between art, advertising and pop culture, Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker intrigue us because they represent farcical ideas in the traditionally serious guise of an oil painting. In fact, many of the pictures are modelled on the compositions of works by the renowned artists Cézanne, Caravaggio, and Georges de la Tour.
Throughout the United States, the paintings have become classic examples of kitsch decoration – repeatedly reproduced, referenced, and modified, both as a bit of a joke and as pop culture’s homage to Coolidge. As the art criticAnnette Ferrara puts it, Coolidge is ‘the most famous American artist you’ve never heard of’ whose works have imprinted themselves on ‘even the most un-art historically inclined person’.
Although Poker Game is currently Coolidge’s most valuable painting, others in the collection have also sold for high prices. In 2005, the originals of Waterloo and A Bold Bluff were bought (as a pair) for $590,400 – outstripping the previous record price for a Coolidge, which was $74,000.
Whether you love them or hate them, Dogs Playing Poker have become some of the most iconic paintings in America. Just be sure not to follow the example of Coolidge’s (obviously cheating) dogs when you play your own poker games.