Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Story of Boxer Dogs Playing Poker

By Tim Higgins

The famous painting of boxer dogs playing poker was created by Cassius Marcellus Clay. Born in 1844 in upstate New York, he was named for his father, Kentucky Senator Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, an avid anti-slavery politician.

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 caught the attention of the Brown & Bigelow Company in 1903. The commisioned him to create a series of comical paintings for their advertisin calendars. Dogs being one of his favorite subjects, Coolidge decided to create paintings of Mastiffs, Collies, Boxers, Great Danes, etc. participating in human activities. Dogs would smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and, most famously, sit around the table for a game of five-card draw.

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apart a game in "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend", and a lascivious black poodle dog presenting a tray of beverages in an unpublished version on "A Bold Bluff."

Our famous boxer dogs playing poker tends to be inspired by the sexual politics of the day and generations to come. Such as in the 1947 play "A Streetcar Named Desire" where the male persona drinks, shouts, smokes, and plays poker. The females role is to domesticate the "bad dog".

But contrary to Stanley Kowalski, throwing his weight around in his stained T-shirt, Coolidges dogs are donning the same cloth as Harry S Truman, the conservative Kansas Town haberdasher who advanced on to become a magistrate and, by the time Streetcar opened, our Chief Executive. The dogs sport either flannel suits or handsome leather collars.

A teentsy lager or scotch was took in, his memoirist secerns us, prohibition era notwithstanding. For the overmastering majority of men it had been a pastime rather than a formula to make hard currency, although winning always trumped the hell out of losing. Even the apparent cheating of Coolidges A crony in need, in which a English bulldog passes the ace of clubs under the table to a scrapper holding the 3 additional aces, is more than an ironic relation to the riverboat sharping of old than to anything these dogs would continually recur to while playing against one another.

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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