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.
Cassius had a variety of day jobs in banking, education, journalism, but possesed a natural ability for art and drafting. Never having received formal art training, he became well known in his twenties for his weekly sketches in the local newspaper. Some other artistic endeavours of his proved to gain him attention as well including his opera he composed about the 1881 mosquito epidemic and his invention of "comic foreground", a placard used in novelty photographs where tourists stand behind a painting of a musclemen and bathing beauties and appear to have that body.
Coolidge was very found of dogs. So found of them in fact, that when a calendar publisher, the Brown & Bigelow company, hired him to create a humorous series of paintings, 9 of the 16 paintings were of dogs. What made the series humorous was that the dogs were doing things only people could do. This include boozing, smoking pipes and cigars, and playing poker accross a green felt table.
To a dog, Calvin Coolidge poker players are upper-middle-class magistrates and attorneys and men of affairs. The only females in the series are a couple of beagles that utilize their unrolled umbrellas to break apart a game in "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend", and a lascivious black poodle dog presenting a tray of beverages in an unpublished version on "A Bold Bluff."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.
Poker nights had been circled on the calendars by solid male voters since 1875, the same year a New York Times editorialist came to the conclusion the national game was not base-ball, but poker. By the turn of the century, the United States Printing Company, a purveyor of playing cards, had put together the 1st set of consistent rules for draw poker and mailed them to card clubs and newspapers round the country. - 20896
Cassius had a variety of day jobs in banking, education, journalism, but possesed a natural ability for art and drafting. Never having received formal art training, he became well known in his twenties for his weekly sketches in the local newspaper. Some other artistic endeavours of his proved to gain him attention as well including his opera he composed about the 1881 mosquito epidemic and his invention of "comic foreground", a placard used in novelty photographs where tourists stand behind a painting of a musclemen and bathing beauties and appear to have that body.
Coolidge was very found of dogs. So found of them in fact, that when a calendar publisher, the Brown & Bigelow company, hired him to create a humorous series of paintings, 9 of the 16 paintings were of dogs. What made the series humorous was that the dogs were doing things only people could do. This include boozing, smoking pipes and cigars, and playing poker accross a green felt table.
To a dog, Calvin Coolidge poker players are upper-middle-class magistrates and attorneys and men of affairs. The only females in the series are a couple of beagles that utilize their unrolled umbrellas to break apart a game in "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend", and a lascivious black poodle dog presenting a tray of beverages in an unpublished version on "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.
Poker nights had been circled on the calendars by solid male voters since 1875, the same year a New York Times editorialist came to the conclusion the national game was not base-ball, but poker. By the turn of the century, the United States Printing Company, a purveyor of playing cards, had put together the 1st set of consistent rules for draw poker and mailed them to card clubs and newspapers round the country. - 20896
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