Dogs Playing Poker

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His Station and Four Aces (1903)
A Friend in Need (1903)

Dogs Playing Poker ( English for Dogs Playing Poker ) refers to a series of oil paintings by the American artist CM Coolidge , the 1903 by publishing Brown & Bigelow was commissioned to cigars to market.

Subject

All of the paintings in the series show anthropomorphic dogs , the nine pictures in which the dogs sit around a gaming table became particularly well known. In the United States, the home furnishings depicted in the pictures are typical of the slightly pompous status symbols of the working class. The dogs, on the other hand, are drawn as members of the liberal professions or as (almost exclusively) men of the upper middle class. The period in which the images were created also coincides with the rise of poker as a game for adventurers to a pastime for respected men.

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The Saint Bernard in the paintings Waterloo and A Bold Bluff belonged to Theodore Long, a florist from Fifth Avenue , a friend of Coolidge. The dog's name was Captain .

painting

Waterloo (1906)

The paintings in the Dogs Playing Poker series are:

  • A Bold Bluff (Original title: Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing )
  • A friend in need
  • His Station and Four Aces
  • Pinched with Four Aces
  • Poker sympathy
  • Post mortem
  • Sitting up with a Sick Friend
  • Stranger in camp
  • Waterloo (Original title: Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff )

This was followed by a similar painting, Looks Like Four of a Kind , in 1910 . Some of the paintings in the composition are based on images of human card players made by artists such as Michelangelo , Georges de la Tour and Paul Cézanne .

Perception and criticism

According to the critic Annette Ferrara, Dogs Playing Poker is deeply rooted in the American, if not in the global collective “Schlock” image memory ( Schlock is Yiddish [derived from German whipped cream , not to be confused with Schmock ] and denotes a cheap or inferior copy of art , similar to kitsch ). The paintings are indelibly burned into the subconscious through their never-ending reproduction in all kinds of pop cultural ephemera . This is primarily based on the fact that the pictures show dogs and that they are presented in a very anthropomorphic manner. The poker player and author James McManus, on the other hand, sees the popularity as being due to the fact that the pictures are "so funny". Poker is a game that requires special brain activity and the idea that dogs play poker is "obviously absurd".

On 15 February 2005, the originals were A Bold Bluff and Waterloo at auction by an anonymous buyer for combined 590,400 US dollars purchased. This is the highest price any Coolidge painting has ever fetched. Previously, the maximum price was $ 74,000.

literature

  • Maria Ochoa Harris: A Friendly Game of poker , Chicago Review Press, 2003, ISBN 1556525125

Web links

Commons : Dogs Playing Poker  - Collection of Images

Remarks

  1. ^ Ooo Woo - Complete Dog Resource: Dogs Playing Poker , Retrieved September 8, 2013.
  2. ↑ Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker James McManus, Macmillan, October 27, 2009.
  3. ^ A b c New York Times : Play It Close to the Muzzle and Paws on the Table, December 3, 2005, Accessed September 8, 2013
  4. ↑ Ten by Ten Magazine: Lucky Dog! ( Memento of March 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , Retrieved September 8, 2013.
  5. ^ San Jose Mercury News: A New York auction offers artistic treats for dog lovers, February 11, 2005
  6. ↑ CNN : 'Dogs Playing Poker' sell for $ 590K on February 16, 2005, accessed September 8, 2013