Dogs Playing Poker

Dogs Playing Poker is the informal name for a series of oil paintings by American artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge created between 1894 and 1910. Most of the paintings depict dogs playing the card game poker, and a smaller number show dogs performing other human actions. The best known works are the 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration. Depictions and reenactments of the series have appeared in many films, television shows, theater productions, and other popular culture art forms. 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". The first painting, Coolidge's 1894 Poker Game, sold for $658,000 at a 2015 auction.