What poker player worth his chips hasn’t seen the poker playing dogs and wondered where they came from? Wonder no more; the man’s name was Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
Coolidge, born in 1844 in upstate New York was an avid outdoorsman with a gift with the paint brush and an entraupenors ambition. Before becoming famous with the poker dog series, he dabbled in a number of other interests including banking and news papering.
Around 1875 Coolidge began painting canine caricatures. Local merchants loved the pictures and had prints made as premiums to be given away to customers. Brown and Bigelow an advertising agency then commissioned Coolidge to create a series of dog portraits in various game room activities (There are nine paintings in the series). Calendars and prints of the dogs soon festooned the walls of shops, garages, and basement workshops.
In 2005 a pair of Coolidge paintings, Waterloo and a Bold Bluff sold at auction in New York for $540,000, in 2008 Another painting Only A Pair of Deuces sold for $193,000. With the recent surge in popularity of poker and Texas hold ’em, the prints have increased in value and are considered a nice edition to anyone’s game room.
Bold Bluff
Waterloo
