They say the value of something is whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. All it takes is one person to REALLY want something for the price to skyrocket (well, maybe two people, as only a fool would bid against himself). So when you think of the kitchy dogs playing poker paintings, don’t laugh, because one of them just sold for $658,000 at Sotheby’s art auction.
The painting, titled “Poker Game,” was painted in 1894 by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. It is not THE dogs playing poker painting that has become famous in American history – that one, also by Coolidge, is called “A Friend in Need” – but nevertheless, it is considered an important part of American culture and thus has significant value as both art and Americana.
Both “Poker Game” and “A Friend in Need” are part of a series of sixteen oil paintings (“Dogs Playing Poker” series) featuring anthropomorphized dogs commissioned by the Brown & Bigelow cigar company in 1903 for a calendar. They have become synonymous with both humor and poor decorative taste. Nevertheless, because of the unique niche they have found themselves in during the past century, they have become quite valuable pieces of art. “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo,” two other paintings in the series, sold as a pair for $590,400 in 2005.
Sotheby’s summarizes how Coolidge got started in the dog painting game in on the webpage for the auction:
In the upstate New York town of Antwerp, Coolidge worked, almost simultaneously, as a druggist, painter of street signs and house numbers, and founder of the first newspaper and earliest bank all within the years between 1868 and 1872. It was after a trip to Europe in 1873 that he turned up in Rochester, New York, as the portraitist of dogs whose life-style mirrored the successful middle-class humans of his time. Coolidge’s first customers were cigar companies, who printed copies of his paintings for giveaways. His fortunes rose when he signed a contract with the printers Brown & Bigelow, who turned out hundreds of thousands of copies of his dog-genre subjects as advertising posters, calendars, and prints.
Sotheby’s also quotes an article titled “A Man’s Life” from the February 1973 edition of American Heritage magazine in explaining society’s attraction to Coolidge’s work:
Coolidge’s poker-faced style is still engaging today. His dogs fit with amazing ease into such human male phenomena as the all-night card game, the commuter train, and the ball park. His details of expression, clothing, and furniture are precise. Uncannily, the earnest animals resemble people we all know, causing distinctions of race, breed, and color to vanish and evoking the sentiment on an old Maryland gravestone: MAJOR Born a Dog Died a Gentleman.
The lesson to be learned here is to never throw anything away. That macaroni-on-velvet portrait of Elvis with airbrush finish could be worth something someday.
