Dogs Playing Poker
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. Coolidge paintings. The title of Coolidge's original 1894 painting is "Poker Game". The titles in the Brown & Bigelow series are: 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.