Dogs Playing Poker

Dogs Playing Poker refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a series of sixteen oil paintings, 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.

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."

The first painting, Coolidge's 1894 Poker Game, realized $658,000 at a Sotheby's New York sale on 18 November 2015.

The title of Coolidge's 1894 painting is Poker Game.

The titles in the Brown & Bigelow Dogs Playing Poker series are:

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

Some of the compositions in the series are modeled on 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.

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