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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.

The young Quaker draftsman, known to friends and family as Cash, received no formal art education, but was placing sketches in his local newspaper by the time he was 20. He published a drawing in Harper’s Weekly in 1878, composed an opera about the New Jersey mosquito epidemic of 1881, and invented what he called “comic foregrounds,” those placards of headless musclemen and bathing beauties tourists like to prop their own heads above, to be photographed. All this while holding down a startling variety of day jobs in banking, education, and journalism.

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.

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.

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.

In 1875, some felt the national game was poker and not baseball. Poker nights were circled on the calendar of men all across the nation. Several years later, the United States Printing Company, had put together the first set of consistent rules for the game and these were sent to periodicals and cardclubs everywhere.

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