Past Auction

Dogs in Art

Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 1pm EST |

New York

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'Dogs Playing Poker' Sells for a Record $590,400

'Dogs Playing Poker' Sells for a Record $590,400 at Doyle on February 15, 2005
Annual Dogs in Art Auction Sets World Auction Record for Dogs Playing Poker Artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge
Intense Competition for Pair of Paintings from Coolidge's Original 1903 Series

Paddles were wagging at Doyle New York's annual Dogs in Art auction on February 15, 2005 as competitive bidding resulted in new world auction records for three artists. Coinciding each year with the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, this popular auction offers two centuries of canine paintings, paintings, prints, bronzes and other objects by a variety of prominent artists.

Highlighting this year's sale were two rare paintings from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's 1903 series of dogs playing poker. The pair were estimated to fetch $30,000-50,000 at the auction. After intense bidding from several determined bidders on the telephones and in the salesroom, the pair sold to a private collector from New York City for a staggering $590,400, setting a new world auction record for the artist.

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was born in upstate New York in 1844 to abolitionist Quaker farmers who named him after statesman Henry Clay’s brother, Cassius Marcellus Clay. Known to friends and family as “Cash”, Coolidge appears to have had little formal art education, yet he was already sketching cartoons for his local newspaper by the time he was twenty. An accomplished cartoonist, he is credited with creating the familiar life-size Boardwalk cutouts, which he called Comic Foregrounds, into which one’s head was placed so as to be photographed as an amusing character.

In 1903, Coolidge contracted with the advertising firm of Brown & Bigelow of St. Paul, Minnesota to create sixteen paintings of dogs in various human-like situations. Nine of these paintings depicted dogs around a card table, two of which were offered at the auction. In A Bold Bluff, a poker-faced St. Bernard with a weak hand bluffs as the dogs lay their bets, and in Waterloo, the St. Bernard rakes in the pot much to the consternation of his fellow pooches.

In addition to the two works by Cassius Coolidge, new world auction records were set for works by Percival Leonard Rosseau and Thomas Earl.

Percival Leonard Rosseau was often invited by his patrons to hunt and paint on their estates. Most prominent among these was Percy Rockefeller, who made Rosseau a member of his hunting club at Overhills, on his estate in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Rockefeller erected a studio for Rosseau on his estate and often lent his bird dogs to Rosseau as models. Painted in 1919, On Grassy Hill, depicts two setters, Transue Bill and Glensale Harry, belonging to the Rockefeller family. As one points, the other is gracefully ‘backstanding.’ The entire work is handled with Rosseau’s typically vibrant yet elegant brushwork. Estimated to bring $50,000-70,000, the paintings sold for $120,000, a record price for the artist.

Other featured paintings in the auction included Terrier in a Landscape, attributed to Thomas Earl, which sold for $22,800, well above the estimate of $3,000-5,000, and a new record for Earl. An oil depicting two pointers by the German/American artist Edmund Henry Osthaus sold for $39,000 and Charles Olivier Depenne’s Hunting Dogs at Rest beneath a Tree sold for $14,400.

As in years past, Doyle New York hosted a special champagne brunch during the Dogs in Art exhibition to benefit a canine charity. Co-hosted with the American Kennel Club (AKC), this year’s brunch benefited DOGNY, the AKC’s charitable program that supports canine search and rescue organizations across the nation through the AKC CAR Canine Support and Relief Fund. Over 275 humans and their canine companions attended the event, complete with doggie bags courtesy of Pedigree Food for Dogs.