The famous painting of boxer dogs playing poker was created by Cassius Marcellus Clay. Born in 1844 in upstate New York, he was named for his father, Kentucky Senator Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, an avid anti-slavery politician.
Cassius had a variety of day jobs in banking, education, journalism, but possesed a natural ability for art and drafting. Never having received formal art training, he became well known in his twenties for his weekly sketches in the local newspaper. Some other artistic endeavours of his proved to gain him attention as well including his opera he composed about the 1881 mosquito epidemic and his invention of "comic foreground", a placard used in novelty photographs where tourists stand behind a painting of a musclemen and bathing beauties and appear to have that body.
In 1903, Coolidge was commissioned to produce a series of humorous paintings for the Brown & Bigelow Company, a purveyor of advertising calendars. His favorite subjects were large dogs like mastiffs, collies, Great Danes, and St. Bernards doing things only people can do. In nine of the 16 pictures, they drink bootleg whiskey and beer, smoke cigars or fusty meerschaum pipes, and avidly play five-card draw. A typical scene has them sitting in a comfortable den around the green felt top of a card table. A shaded lamp centered above them casts the scene's only light. According to the grandfather clock in one of the dens, it's 1:10 in the morning.
The dogs had took the place of men like attoneys, magistrates, upper-classmen. These were the Great Danes, the Boxers, and the Mastiffs. Females were portrayed by beagles and poodles serving a tray of beverages and were only featured in a few paintings in the series such as "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend" and "A Bold Bluff".
Our famous boxer dogs playing poker tends to be inspired by the sexual politics of the day and generations to come. Such as in the 1947 play "A Streetcar Named Desire" where the male persona drinks, shouts, smokes, and plays poker. The females role is to domesticate the "bad dog".
But in contrast to Stanley Kowalski, whose attire consisted of a sife beater, our poker boxer dogs are sporting either flannel suits or handsome leather collars, donning the same attire as Harry S Truman, who by the time Streetcar opened, was our Chief Executive.
A teentsy lager or scotch was took in, his memoirist secerns us, prohibition era notwithstanding. For the overmastering majority of men it had been a pastime rather than a formula to make hard currency, although winning always trumped the hell out of losing. Even the apparent cheating of Coolidges A crony in need, in which a English bulldog passes the ace of clubs under the table to a scrapper holding the 3 additional aces, is more than an ironic relation to the riverboat sharping of old than to anything these dogs would continually recur to while playing against one another.
In 1875, some felt the national game was poker and not baseball. Poker nights were circled on the calendar of men all across the nation. Several years later, the United States Printing Company, had put together the first set of consistent rules for the game and these were sent to periodicals and cardclubs everywhere. - 20785
Cassius had a variety of day jobs in banking, education, journalism, but possesed a natural ability for art and drafting. Never having received formal art training, he became well known in his twenties for his weekly sketches in the local newspaper. Some other artistic endeavours of his proved to gain him attention as well including his opera he composed about the 1881 mosquito epidemic and his invention of "comic foreground", a placard used in novelty photographs where tourists stand behind a painting of a musclemen and bathing beauties and appear to have that body.
In 1903, Coolidge was commissioned to produce a series of humorous paintings for the Brown & Bigelow Company, a purveyor of advertising calendars. His favorite subjects were large dogs like mastiffs, collies, Great Danes, and St. Bernards doing things only people can do. In nine of the 16 pictures, they drink bootleg whiskey and beer, smoke cigars or fusty meerschaum pipes, and avidly play five-card draw. A typical scene has them sitting in a comfortable den around the green felt top of a card table. A shaded lamp centered above them casts the scene's only light. According to the grandfather clock in one of the dens, it's 1:10 in the morning.
The dogs had took the place of men like attoneys, magistrates, upper-classmen. These were the Great Danes, the Boxers, and the Mastiffs. Females were portrayed by beagles and poodles serving a tray of beverages and were only featured in a few paintings in the series such as "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend" and "A Bold Bluff".
Our famous boxer dogs playing poker tends to be inspired by the sexual politics of the day and generations to come. Such as in the 1947 play "A Streetcar Named Desire" where the male persona drinks, shouts, smokes, and plays poker. The females role is to domesticate the "bad dog".
But in contrast to Stanley Kowalski, whose attire consisted of a sife beater, our poker boxer dogs are sporting either flannel suits or handsome leather collars, donning the same attire as Harry S Truman, who by the time Streetcar opened, was our Chief Executive.
A teentsy lager or scotch was took in, his memoirist secerns us, prohibition era notwithstanding. For the overmastering majority of men it had been a pastime rather than a formula to make hard currency, although winning always trumped the hell out of losing. Even the apparent cheating of Coolidges A crony in need, in which a English bulldog passes the ace of clubs under the table to a scrapper holding the 3 additional aces, is more than an ironic relation to the riverboat sharping of old than to anything these dogs would continually recur to while playing against one another.
In 1875, some felt the national game was poker and not baseball. Poker nights were circled on the calendar of men all across the nation. Several years later, the United States Printing Company, had put together the first set of consistent rules for the game and these were sent to periodicals and cardclubs everywhere. - 20785
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