Dogs playing Poker

Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 4:19 am

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, the wry commercial artist who gave us dogs playing poker, was born in upstate New York in 1844.Between 1906 and his death in 1934, Coolidge produced 16 pictures of dogs playing poker for the Brown & Bigelow company, a purveyor of calendars. Large dogs like collies, mastiffs, Great Danes and St. Bernards are typically arrayed in a comfortable den around a card table with a green felt top. A shaded lamp centered above them casts the scene’s only light.

To a dog, Coolidge’s figures are upper-middle-class lawyers and businessmen. They drink beer or whiskey, smoke pipes or cigars, and play poker. The only females in the series are a pair of terriers who try to break up a game and a poodle with a bow in her hair delivering a trayful of drinks to another.

A Bold Bluff

In a famous Coolidge diptych, a bespectacled St. Bernard holds a measly pair of deuces but has bet a large number of chips. Four tablemates stare at him hard, searching his muzzle for tells.

Waterloo

In the second painting, the St. Bernard rakes in a big pot of chips, having shown the weak hand to the dismay of his opponents. Coolidge originally dubbed these two “Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing” and “Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff,” – retitled “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo,” respectively, by Brown & Bigelow.

The Coolidge sense of humor was resonating in pop culture long before the poker boom. Sam Malone, the bartending ladies’ man on “Cheers,” loves Coolidge paintings; Diane Chambers, the meadwench drawn to the finer arts, hates them. William Wegman’s photographs of his Weimaraners in a variety of human costumes and situations were surely inspired, at least in part, by Coolidge’s pooches.

These days his paintings are considered either calendar kitch, pasteurized American cheese or a pithily accurate gloss on male poker fellowship. They have also become rather haute. In February “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo” went on the auction block at Doyle New York with an estimated value of $30,000 for the pair. When the gavel came down, the price – paid by a private, anonymous collector – came to $590,400. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Ms. Chambers. Then fetch me a cold one, and close the door on your way out.