Dogs Playing Poker

His Station and Four Aces by C. M. Coolidge, 1903.

Dogs Playing Poker refers collectively to a series of sixteen oil paintings by C. M. Coolidge, commissioned in 1903 by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars.^[1] All the paintings in the series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the nine in which dogs are seated around a card table have become derisively well-known in the United States as examples of mainly working-class taste in home decoration. 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."^[2]

Coolidge paintings

Waterloo, c. 1906

The titles in the "Dogs Playing Poker" series proper are:

• A Bold Bluff (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing)^[3]
• A Friend in Need
• His Station and Four Aces
• Pinched with Four Aces
• Poker Sympathy
• Post Mortem
• Sitting up with a Sick Friend
• Stranger in Camp
• Waterloo (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff)^[3]

These were followed in 1910 by a similar painting, Looks Like Four of a Kind. Some of the compositions in the series are modeled on paintings of human card-players by such artists as Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Paul Cézanne.^[3]

The St. Bernard in the paintings Waterloo and A Bold Bluff was owned by the Fifth Avenue florist Theodore Lang, who counted Coolidge among his friends. The dog's name was Captain.^[4] On February 15, 2005, the originals of A Bold Bluff and Waterloo were auctioned as a pair to an undisclosed buyer for US $590,400.^[5] The previous top price for a Coolidge was $74,000.^[6]

See also

• Velvet Elvis
• William Wegman

Notes

1. ^ "Dogs Playing Poker". Ooo Woo – Complete Dog Resource. 2008. http://www.ooowoo.com/dogs-playing-poker.html. Retrieved September 1, 2006. ^{[unreliable source?]}
2. ^ Ferrara, Annette (April 2008). "Lucky Dog!". Ten by Ten Magazine. Chicago: Tenfold Media. Archived from the original on March 27, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080327040522/http://www.tenbyten.net/luckydog.html. Retrieved September 1, 2006.  Note: The "collective-schlock" material is transposed from the last paragraph to replace a pronoun in this quote from the first paragaph.
3. ^ ^{a b c} McManus, James. "Play It Close to the Muzzle and Paws on the Table," New York Times (December 3, 2005).
4. ^ Personal communication, Viola Etta Lang, daughter of Theodore Lang, 1991.
5. ^ "A New York auction offers artistic treats for dog lovers," San Jose Mercury News (Feb 11, 2005.)
6. ^ "'Dogs Playing Poker' sell for $590K". Money.com (CNN). February 16, 2005. http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/16/news/newsmakers/poker_dogs/. Retrieved September 11, 2006. 

References

• Harris, Moira. "It's A Dog's World, According to Coolidge," A Friendly Game of Poker (Chicago Review Press, 2003).

External links

• DogsPlayingPoker.org