Named for his father who was a Kentucky Senator, Cassius Marcellus Clay did not follow in his father's political footsteps. In fact, he was the American artist who gave us the famous painting of boxer dogs playing poker.
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 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apart a game in "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend", and a lascivious black poodle dog presenting a tray of beverages in an unpublished version on "A Bold Bluff."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 house paintings portray a good deal the indistinguishable poker and sexual politics that Tennessee Williams embellished more darkly in A Streetcar Named Desire, first brought out in 1947. Set in a New Orleans tenement to the tenors of a tinny blues piano, the play is a world in which men drink, holler, smoke, and play poker. (The Poker Night, in fact, personified Williams' working title.) Except for one valet de chambre, Mitch, they all comport suchlike dogs - as in, "You dog, you." The primary female personas are the bitchily insecure enchantress Blanche DuBois and her pregnant tenderer sister, Stella Kowalski. In either event, their game is to domesticate the bad dogs.
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.
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. - 16928
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 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 house paintings portray a good deal the indistinguishable poker and sexual politics that Tennessee Williams embellished more darkly in A Streetcar Named Desire, first brought out in 1947. Set in a New Orleans tenement to the tenors of a tinny blues piano, the play is a world in which men drink, holler, smoke, and play poker. (The Poker Night, in fact, personified Williams' working title.) Except for one valet de chambre, Mitch, they all comport suchlike dogs - as in, "You dog, you." The primary female personas are the bitchily insecure enchantress Blanche DuBois and her pregnant tenderer sister, Stella Kowalski. In either event, their game is to domesticate the bad dogs.
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.
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. - 16928
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