Dogs Playing Poker

Poker Game, oil on canvas, 1894

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.[1][unreliable source?] 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".[2]

The first painting, Coolidge's 1894 Poker Game, sold for $658,000 at a 2015 auction.[3]

  1. ^ "Dogs Playing Poker". Ooo Woo – Complete Dog Resource. 2008. Archived from the original on April 11, 2017. Retrieved September 1, 2006.
  2. ^ Ferrara, Annette (April 2008). "Lucky Dog!". Ten by Ten Magazine. Chicago: Tenfold Media. Archived from the original on March 27, 2008. Retrieved September 1, 2006.
  3. ^ "That Dogs Playing Poker Painting Just Sold for Over $650,000". GQ.