Dogs Playing Poker
Dogs Playing Poker refers collectively to a series of sixteen oil paintings by C. M. Coolidge, commissioned in 1903 by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars. All the paintings in the series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the nine 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."
Coolidge paintings
The titles in the "Dogs Playing Poker" series proper are:
A Bold Bluff (originally titled 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 (originally titled Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff)
Ten Miles to a Garage
Riding the Goat
New Year's Eve in Dogville
