Six Works From The Popular Dogs Playing Poker Series By Cassius Marcellus Coolidge And How They Came To Be
- Staff
- May 1
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
by #LizPublika
Mention a series of paintings showing dogs playing poker in a social setting, and most will know exactly what you're talking about. We have Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844 - 1934) to thank for that, since he created numerous variations on the dogs-playing-poker theme from 1894 to 1910, some of which are featured below.
At the time, American businesses were beginning to understand the importance of catchy advertising and were finally ready to pay commercial artists to get it. The first modern ad agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, opened its doors in 1869. By 1920, advertising expenditures by American companies surged to 3 billion dollars.
Though he had no formal training as an artist, Coolidge seems to have had an intuitive understanding of what made people laugh and what kinds of images they wanted to see. Unsurprisingly, his knack for crafting playfully surreal images culminated in his magnum opus, the absurdist canine series for which he’s best remembered today.
According to Southeby's:
"It was after a trip to Europe in 1873 that [Coolidge] 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."
Although the Dogs Playing Poker series proved to be his most enduring, Coolidge also painted dogs ballroom dancing and playing football and baseball, which somehow never made the same splash or helped him achieve fame. So, when the successful but unknown Coolidge died in 1934, the obituary in the local paper simply read:
“He painted many pictures of dogs.”
