Dog's Playing Poker

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. 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."


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

• A Bold Bluff                                         
• 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

These were followed in 1910 by a similar painting, Looks Like Four of a Kind. 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. 

For years his images of dogs playing poker while drinking, smoking, and basically getting into trouble graced bachelor pads, bars, and taverns around the country. The scenes always evoked feelings of something American and something modern.

A few theories about his art give more meaning than what initially meets the eye. One theory states that the painting A Friend In Need has great significance. "Coolidge's painting was used in the Second World War to boost the moral of Dutch citizens. The dog with the cigar being Churchill giving America help (on his left hand side), which goes unnoticed. Russia (the most left dog) tries to attract USA's attention, while Hitler (the dog with the pipe and the 'big ears' in front of the clock) watches anxiously.

Poker enthusiast Jim McManus has stated, " In A Friend in Need, the blatant cheating refers back to the early nineteenth century, Mississippi riverboat days, when poker was mainly a series of opportunities to fleece the suckers."

A specialist for Sotheby's Auction House, Alison Cooney, says that people who dismiss the painting as simply "kitsch art" are missing the deeper meaning of his work. "It's a humorous, ironic take; she continues, a jab at middle-class America; another way of poking fun at ourselves."

Another theory suggests that the dogs were all aspects of C.M. Coolidge himself. Known to his friends as "Cash", he loved a good bet and was something of a hustler. He wore a hat and often held a cigar, just as his paintings of dogs did. Other sources hint that he looked like the bulldogs he painted.

In a recent tongue-in-cheek article by Steven J. Rolfes, he writes "In this iconic work, we see a masterly representation of the Last Supper, with Christ (on the left) sitting conveying His wisdom to His followers. We see Judas to His right, with the bag of silver coins at his pawside." He asserts that the painting A Friend in Need has deep arcane roots in a very secret society that even precedes the Illuminati called the "Prior of Dogbone."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_Playing_Poker

http://www.eioba.com/a47115/dogs_playing_poker_beyond_art_behind_coolidge