Last weekend we drove across the Potomac and stopped at a few places in the Sharpsburg area.We didn't find anything worth having and were ready to call it a day when we ran across a couple with all their items lined up along the narrow sidewalk in front of their pre-1900 colonial home. Eric reached for 3 framed prints "Here, we'll take these!" I took a look and there were 3 small prints of dogs playing poker by Collidge in wood frames for $2.00 each. "Yep, I said".
Cassius Coolidge painted 16 anthropormorphized dog paintings in 1903 for an advertising firm in St. Paul, MN. Nine of those prints were dogs playing poker. The 3 prints I got are called Pinched with 4 Aces, Waterloo, and His Station and 4 Aces. In 2005, two of Coolidge's original paintings (A Bold Bluff, and Waterloo Two) sold for $590,000 to a private art collector.
A quick look on Ebay for dogs playing poker yielded hundreds of knock-off, reproductions, and kitchy poker dog items such as posters, shirts, tin signs, playing cards, totebags, neckties, poker chips, trays, figurines, mousepads (yeah, that's mine in the pic) curtains and clocks. There's even a movie called Four Dogs Playing Poker.
My new fun kitchy prints will grace our fake wood-paneled den along with my tiki mug collection, and assorted tiki art such as my giant print of Tikis Playing Poker originally created by Slacks Ferret.
1 comments:
Geez, I wonder how my Cats Playing Blackjack picture is worth. Something tells me that, being bought at a flea market, it's not the genuine article :)
Seriously, though, I've got a few Dogs Playing Poker prints in various form around the office and house, and I never knew their creator's works were worth that much money.
-- Strictly Mike, Online Poker portal (that's my office :)
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