Games Review Blog

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.

Cash, as his friends and family would call him, had never received any formal art training. Though, by the time he was 20, he was a draftsman and frequently had his sketches featured in the local newspaper. A short time later, he had one of his drawings published in Harpers Weekly and subsequently came to be the inventor of “comic foregrounds”, where tourists place their head through a hole in a painting, appearing to have a comical muscular body for photographs.

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.

In the painting, male dogs took on the role of the most common poker players of the time, men of affairs, upper-middle-class magistrates and attorneys. Females were depicted by beagles and poodles serving drinks or attempting to break up the game of incorrigible pooches.

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 contrary to Stanley Kowalski, thrusting his sinewy weight around in the 1st wife-beater T-shirt, Coolidges dogs are emasculated from the same cloth as Harry S Truman, the uxoriously conservative Kansas Town haberdasher who advanced on to become a magistrate and, by the time Streetcar opened, our most main line Chief Executive. The dogs don either flannel suits or handsome leather collars.

Prohibition era notwithstanding, a small lager or whiskey was taken by the dogs in the painting . In one theme, we see the bulldog cheating, passing the much need ace card to a friend. This was not a recurring theme as poker player of the day did not see the game as a way to make hard cash but as a friendly pastime.

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.