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Cassius Marcellus Clay, the wry commercial artist who gave the world dogs playing poker, was born in upstate New York in 1844. He was named after the abolitionist Quaker,Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, one of the most eloquent anti-slavery politicians of the antebellum South, Kentucky Sen.

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.

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”.

The persona of men as the “bad dogs” who smoke, yell, drink and have their poker night is reflected in 1947′s “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Tennessee Williams embellishes sexual politics similar to the scenes of Coolidge’s dogs. Set in New Orleans, it is a world where the men comport suchlike dogs. The main female personas such as Blanche Dubois and her tender sister Stella Kowalski are attempting to put a leash on their men, so to speak.

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.

For the men of Coolidge’s era, poker had been a pastime as opposed to a way to make serious money, though winning was much better than losing. In Coolidge’s” A Crony in Need”, we see an English Bulldog passing an ace under the table to his accomplice holding the other three aces. These theme only appear here as a relation riverboat sharping and does not continually occur in the series.

A New York Times editor had stated in 1875 that the country’s national pastime was not baseball but poker. Male voters since would mark their calendar, circling the night they played poker. Though the game was played all across the country, it wasn’t till several years later that the very first set of official rules for the game was published.

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