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Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844 - 1934) was a United States painter best known for a series of nine paintings of anthropomorphized Dogs Playing Poker.
Born in upstate New York to abolitionist Quaker farmers, Coolidge was known to friends and family as "Cash." While he had no formal training as an artist his natural aptitude for drawing lead him to create cartoons for his local newspaper when in his twenties. He is credited with creating Comic Foregrounds, life-size cutouts into which one's head was placed so as to be photographed as an amusing character.
In 1903, Coolidge contracted with the advertising firm of Brown & Bigelow of St. Paul, Minnesota, to create sixteen oil paintings of dogs in various human poses:
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A Bachelor's Dog
A Bold Bluff
Breach of Promise Suit
A Friend in Need
His Station and Four Aces
New Year's Eve in Dog Ville
One to Tie Two to Win
Pinched with Four Aces
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Poker Sympathy
Post Mortem
The Reunion
Riding the Goat
Sitting up with a Sick Friend
Stranger in Camp
Ten Miles to a Garage
Waterloo: Two
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Nine of them depict dogs playing poker. On February 15, 2005, two of these much imitated paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, went on the auction block expecting to fetch between $30,000 and $50,000 but surprisingly sold for $590,400. The auction set an auction record for Coolidge, whose previous top sale was $74,000.
In 1910 Coolidge painted "Looks Like Four of a Kind" in the same style as his earlier "Dogs Playing Poker" series.
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