A Friend in Need Dogs Playing Poker Cassius Marcellus Coolidge Painting Sale

Dogs Playing Poker refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a series of sixteen oil paintings for sale, and a 1910 painting by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. Brown & Bigelow commissioned the 16 painting series in 1903 to advertise cigars. All eighteen paintings in the 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 mainly working-class taste in home decoration. Some of the compositions in the series are modeled on artworks paintings of human card-players by such artists as Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Paul Cézanne.

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. The 2015 sale price of Coolidge's 1894 Poker Game, $658,000, is now the highest price paid for a Coolidge.

Oil Paintings Dogs Playing Poker
Cassius Coolidge was a popular American artist as norman rockwell and edward hopper, and was also nicknamed Cash. As a self-trained artist, his climb to make a name for himself was a lot different than other established artists. The many jobs that he held before becoming a painter showed a very scattered resume, but one that ended well as jack vettriano and tamara de lempicka. Coolidge worked as a cartoonist, art teacher, druggist, street sign painter, house painter, bank owner and newspaper owner. The middle class figures shown in his poker dogs oil painting showed his familiarity with working the associated types of jobs. Not all of the paintings in the series were about dogs playing poker, as Coolridge looked to shake things up a bit. Only nine of the paintings are about the poker game, and Higher education shows the dogs playing football, another American pastime. The interesting thing about the change of scenery is that all of the works have a sequential narrative that’s easy to miss if you ignore one of Coolidge’s inclusions. With dogs playing cards instead of landscape paintings, the last painting is as important as the first one. In Philadelphia, N.Y., Coolidge has become a hometown hero for his contributions. He wasn’t fully recognized locally until his daughter offered up a never before seen print from his private collection. That was in 1991, and most likely played a part in the record setting sale of some of his dogs painting portraits playing cards paintings. Now the irreplaceable print can be seen in the local library of the small town, and is a big deal to visitors. When poker dogs first came out, it was widely regarded as kitsch in the art community. History has shown that it is a piece of art to be appreciated by all classes, and the greatest creation of all from Coolidge’s career.

Painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge will forever be known for starting the dogs playing poker series, one of the most recognizable works in the world. The first entrance into the dog paintings was in 1894, and was titled poker game. It was a simple beginning for the grandfather painting of the series, with the next one coming in 1910. Even with the large gap between the creation of the first and second dogs playing cards paintings, the popularity of it never faded. In the US it is a widely used business and home decoration as Iris Van Gogh and The Kiss Klimt that has also been reproduced multiple times to great effect. A noticeable part of the series is how it uses anthropomorphized dogs. Anthropomorphism in art was used long before poker dogs, and is all about embedding human traits into animal figures. This also includes human emotions, so it really opens up a brand new world for any artist that wants to make it a primary part of their painting. There is also a human psychology element to using anthropomorphized animals in paintings, so it is primarily up to the artist to use them convincingly to convey their personal message as what diego rivera and frida kahlo did. When it is done right, it can be very convincing as a visual art. What made dogs playing poker stand out was that it became the defacto taste in art when it came to the working class in the United States. Even today there are not a lot of paintings that have become the staple of the working class in the same way that dogs playing cards has become. Buyers that were not art enthusiasts would find the painting more relatable than other works such as The Scream and Starry Night Van Gogh, and there is a bit of charm in seeing a bunch of dogs doing human things. Despite its popularity with the working class, the series never resonated well with art critics.

There are eighteen paintings in total when the original from 1894 is counted. The original 1894 poker game is what led to sixteen additional works, and then a lone painting in 1910 called looks like four of a kind. The poker dogs series of paintings were mostly completed in the early 1900’s, and were all important to the state of Americana at the time rather than Las Meninas and Rembrandt Night Watch. Out of all things related to the image of Americana, poker dogs has managed to even transcend American culture and make waves in other cultures with similar working class systems. Dogs playing poker is the most reproduced Coolidge painting of his career, and has seen multiple formats have a go at its many forms. This includes prints, calendars, posters and even other artists like henri matisse and marc chagall. It has also been a hot button topic in the art world which pitted die hard critics against the common viewer of art. The success of the painting still baffles a lot of top tier critics, even when some of their peers have changed their minds about Coolidge’s work. The painting isn’t politically charged, yet has a very strong middle class message with its choice of figures as toperfect.com reviews & complaints. If it wasn’t for Brown & Bigelow, fans would have never got a chance to see the rest of the series. After his first go at dogs playing poker, Coolidge did other works until he was commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to do sixteen more paintings of the same type. The Minnesota based publishing company wanted to use Coolidge’s dogs to advertise cigars like works of andy warhol and roy lichtenstein. They saw enough potential in the original painting that they opted to continue it on into a series rather than start fresh. This was a big step in the career of Coolidge, and also introduced him to a lot of fellow artists that were under the similar contracts.


Dogs playing cards isn’t the only series that has been commissioned by big companies, and during the advertising boom a lot of artists made serious money. A lot of the promotional giveaways from Brown & Bigelow were associated with the work of Coolidge, so in many ways kept his name and his work in the public’s mind in Toperfect reviews. Even with Coolidge being the creator of Comic Foregrounds, over time he is most remembered for his series of poker dogs paintings. It was a great business move for an artist that wasn’t appreciated like the Picasso’s or da Vinci’s of our time. Dogs playing poker is different from dogs in other famous paintings because the former really isn’t about dogs. Famous paintings with dogs in them like Lady Hamilton as Nature from George Romney invoke a completely different feeling to the viewer than canines sitting around the table playing a card game. This is where the anthropomorphized animals come into play, and how they completely change the look and feel of a painting like Picasso Guernica and Melting Clocks. Not even Dog half-submerged by Francisco de Goya can capture the middle class spirit of poker dogs. This has also led to the paintings selling for a considerable sum, even among the art elite. The first painting in the series sold for $658,000 dollars, which is great for an 1894 painting that got no respect from within the community as Persistence Of Memory and The Birth of Venus. The shocking Sotheby’s auction in New York caught a lot of people off guard, and was one of the better surprises of 2015 in the art world. It is still the highest price paid for a Coolidge painting, and is only beaten by the pair of A Bold Blff and Waterloo that sold for $594,000 dollars as a pair.


In today’s media driven world, while older more traditional paintings have begun to fade from publics gaze as toperfect.com reviews, paintings like dogs playing cards continue rise. It has been referenced in television, books, movies and even animation. The most popular use of the painting in movies is tied to the 2016 film The Accountant, while on the small screen, television show Cheers made reference of the painting with its main character. Yet the most incredible use of dogs playing cards in a modern media format is with the critically acclaimed video game Psychonauts, where an entire level is dedicated to the painting as Manet Olympia and Van Gogh Self Portrait. The most popular painting in the entire series is A Friend in Need, and is often mistitled as dogs playing poker. It’s about two bulldogs and five hounds in a poker game, with the two bulldogs cheating in order to get an advantage. A club card is being slipped to the other bulldog underneath the table, although there are no other identifying numbers or letters to figure out what rank it is. This is also the most gifted reproduced paintings of the series, since it adds in a little humor that everyone can relate to like works of joan miro and rene magritte. One of the reasons critics were quick to pan the series was due to its commercial usage. Works like dogs playing cards were made to be mass produced, and by the very nature of the original commission the goal was to put it in as many homes as possible. The same type of backlash that would affect fellow artist Thomas Kinkade also hit Coolidge, where the elite in the art community looked at poker dogs as the commercialization of art as works by salvador dali. Coolidge gained has a better place in art history over Kinkade thanks to a lot of art critics changing their tone on his overall body of work. Some of the harsher critics even consider it to be genuine art.


Coolidge paintings
The title of Coolidge's 1894 painting is Poker Game.
The titles in the Brown & Bigelow Dogs Playing Poker series are:
A Bachelor's Dog
A Bold Bluff - poker (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing)
Breach of Promise Suit – testifying in court
A Friend in Need (1903) – poker, cheating
His Station and Four Aces (1903) – poker
New Year's Eve in Dogville – ballroom dancing
One to Tie Two to Win – baseball
Pinched with Four Aces – poker, illegal gambling
Poker Sympathy – poker
Post Mortem – poker, camaraderie
The Reunion – smoking and drinking, camaraderie
Riding the Goat – Masonic initiation
Sitting up with a Sick Friend (1905) – poker, gender relations
Stranger in Camp – poker, camping
Ten Miles to a Garage – travel, car trouble, teamwork
A Waterloo (1906) – poker (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff) (1906)
These were followed in 1910 by a similar painting, Looks Like Four of a Kind.


In popular culture
In the TV sitcom Cheers, Sam Malone loves the paintings (in particular one of Dogs Playing Blackjack) while his more sophisticated lover, Diane Chambers, hates them. Sam says that he sees something new everytime he looks at it like Mona Lisa and The Last Supper - such as one of the dogs cheating.
The set for the TV show Roseanne had a reproduction of one of the paintings in the family's living room.
The cover of the 1981 album, Moving Pictures, by Rush, features several pictures being moved, one of which is DPP.
The animated television series The Simpsons has made several references to the paintings, most notoriously in "Treehouse of Horror IV", when Homer is driven to insanity by his mix of intense fear and intense amusement in response to one of the paintings.
The short story "A Gamble with Wildthyme" by Steve Lyons (from the book Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus) concerns the cheating taking place in the Coolidge painting A Friend in Need.
Dogs Playing Poker TV ads were aired during ESPN Sunday Night Football during the 1998 and 1999 National Football League seasons. The 1998 ads showed animatronics dogs (the Bulldog's voiceover was by Gilbert Gottfried), neither Creation of Adam nor Girl With A Pearl Earring, while the 1999 commercials used human actors, including Herman Moore, Terrell Davis, Joe Theismann, and Jason Sehorn.
The videogame Psychonauts by Tim Schafer has an entire level, named "Black Velvetopia", dedicated to kitsch art. After completing the level, the artist, Edgar Teglee, begins painting a DPP painting, remarking that although it is impossible for dogs to play cards without thumbs, still they go on, a metaphor for life. Coincidentally, the level right before "Black Velvetopia" is called "Waterloo World".
In the 1993 computer game Day of the Tentacle, a stylized DPP painting decorates the bedroom of one of the characters as Van Gogh Sunflowers and Monet Water Lilies.
In the Family Guy episode "Saving Private Brian", Mayor West is discovered playing poker with dogs in the school's basement.
Also in the Family Guy episode "Road to Rhode Island", Stewie comments on Dogs Playing Poker paintings hanging on the wall at Brian's mother's house. He suggests that since Jesus is alone in one of the other paintings, the dogs should invite him to their card game.
In the 2009 Disney Pixar animated film Up, several of the dog characters are briefly seen playing poker, using a pile of Milk-Bones as poker chips.
In Larry Shue's play The Foreigner, a character complains that she does not want to be in her motel room because there is a "Damn picture on the wall of some dogs playin' poker."


In the television show NewsRadio's spoof of the movie Titanic, characters fleeing the sinking ship/radio broadcasting studio dump famous artworks as Cafe Terrace at Night and Primavera Botticelli, but hold on to one of the Dogs Playing Poker paintings, which character Jimmy James claims is a "great picture".
In the 1999 movie remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the character Banning finds the stolen Monet in Crown's house and takes it back to the police station. However, on expert examination it turns out to be a fake, painted on top of a Dogs Playing Poker canvas.
In an episode of the TV series That '70s Show ("Hunting"), DPP is parodied by the characters taking the places of the dogs.
In an episode of Animaniacs, a young pablo picasso's artistic frustration is demonstrated by his producing a DPP painting.
In the TV show The Suite Life of Zack and Cody London gets inspired to buy a copy of the painting for her dogs birthday party.
In an episode of White collar the main protagonist, who is considered an expert on art, jokes about hanging a DPP on a wall.
"Weird Al" Yankovic mentions Dogs Playing Poker in his song "Velvet Elvis".
In an episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Courage goes into a DPP painting and picks up an untouched hand. He then laughs and puts it down, which shocks the other dogs upon seeing that the hand is a royal flush. Courage is then kicked out of the painting by one of the other dogs.
In an episode of My Gym Partner's A Monkey, when Adam was told to look inside his brain, all he see is reminiscent of a DPP painting.
In one notable strip of The Far Side, a homeless artist, named Gus Nickerson in the caption, is depicted lying on the street, surrounded by unsold paintings similar to DPP but depicting other animals such as giraffes, bugs, chickens and gators. The caption tells of how he was unemployed until someone said, "Hey, have you ever tried dogs playing poker"?
In the 2004 remake of Around the World in 80 Days, Monique has a painting of Dogs Playing Poker in her sketchbook.
In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a number of dog characters in the Looney Tunes series are seen playing poker at Yosemite Sam's casino.
In the TV series Boy Meets World, Eric is cleaning out the garage when he finds one of the Dogs Playing Poker paintings. He holds it up to show his parents.
In the popular indie Game Undertale, the dogs that make up the royal canine unit are seen playing poker in a restaurant.
In the 2008 American video game Wizard 101, a painting titled Dogs Playing Cards can be collected; the painting is based on A Friend in Need (1903) and fits in the context of the game's Marleybone game world, which features anthropomorphic dog characters.
In the 2016 film, The Accountant, the painting is discussed by the lead characters. Later, a DPP is used as a cover to hide a high priced Jackson Pollock painting, and not Impression Sunrise or Liberty Leading the People.