Background
Coolidge was born in Antwerp, New York to abolitionist Quaker farmers, and was raised in Philadelphia, New New York
Coolidge was born in Antwerp, New York to abolitionist Quaker farmers, and was raised in Philadelphia, New New York
He had little formal training as an artist
After leaving the family farm here in the early 1860s, Coolidge had many careers. Between 1868 and 1872 Cassius Marcellus Coolidge worked as a druggist and sign painter, founded a bank and a newspaper, then moved from Antwerp, New York, to Rochester, where he started painting dogs in human situations. Editorial work
Coolidge began his art career in his twenties, one of his early jobs being the creation of cartoons for a local newspaper.
Comic foregrounds
He is credited with creating "comic foregrounds," novelty photographs which combined a portrait of the sitter with a caricatured body, produced by the sitter holding between two sticks a canvas on which Coolidge drew or painted the caricature, the final product being similar to the photographs produced at midways and carnivals when sitters place their heads into openings in life-size caricatures.
Calendar paintings
According to the advertising firm Brown & Bigelow, then primarily a producer of advertising calendars, Coolidge began his relationship with the firm in 1903. From the mid-1900s to the mid-1910s, Coolidge created sixteen oil paintings for them, all of which featured anthropomorphic dogs, including nine scenes of dogs playing poker, a motif Coolidge is credited with inventing.
The original series of 16 paintings, and their themes, are:
Other paintings
Additional paintings in a similar vein include:
Kelly Pool (ca 1909) – pool
Named for the then-common pool-game Kelly pool, Coolidge"s painting of dogs playing pool may be considered a progenitor of another memetic popular-culture art genre, that of "dogs playing pool," but it is unlikely that other 20th-century artists in the genre were aware of this little-known painting. On February 15, 2005, two Coolidge paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, which may have been the originals of the paintings used by Brown & Bigelow, went on the auction block at Doyle New New York
Expected to fetch between $30,000 and $50,000, the pair sold for $590,400.
The result surpassed the previous auction record of $74,000 for Coolidge. His 1894 Poker Game realized $658,000 at a Sotheby"s New York sale on 18 November 2015.