page_title: Dogs Playing Poker
section_title: Coolidge paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Dogs Playing Poker / Coolidge paintings
caption_attribution_description: English: "Sitting up with a Sick Friend" by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, part of the Dogs Playing Poker series.
context_page_description: Dogs Playing Poker, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars, and a 1910 painting. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration. Depictions and reenactments of the series have appeared in many films, television shows, theater productions, and other popular culture art forms.
  Critic Annette Ferrara has described Dogs Playing Poker as "indelibly burned into ... the American collective-schlock subconscious ... through incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera".
  The first painting, Coolidge's 1894 Poker Game, sold for $658,000 at a 2015 auction.
context_section_description: The title of Coolidge's original 1894 painting is Poker Game.
  The titles in the Brown & Bigelow series are:
  A Bachelor's Dog – reading the mail
  A Bold Bluff  – poker (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing)
  Breach of Promise Suit – testifying in court
  A Friend in Need (1903) – poker, cheating
  His Station and Four Aces (1903) – poker
  New Year's Eve in Dogville – ballroom dancing
  One to Tie Two to Win – baseball
  Pinched with Four Aces – poker, illegal gambling
  Poker Sympathy – poker
  Post Mortem – poker, camaraderie
  The Reunion – smoking and drinking, camaraderie
  Riding the Goat – Masonic initiation
  Sitting up with a Sick Friend (1905) – poker, gender relations
  Stranger in Camp – poker, camping
  Ten Miles to a Garage – travel, car trouble, teamwork
  A Waterloo (1906) – poker (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff)
  These were followed in 1910 by a similar painting, Looks Like Four of a Kind. Other Coolidge paintings featuring anthropomorphized dogs include Kelly Pool, which shows dogs playing kelly pool.
  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.
  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. The previous top price for a Coolidge was $74,000. In 2015, Poker Game sold for $658,000, currently the highest price paid for a Coolidge.
caption: Sitting up with a Sick Friend (c. 1905)
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