Post Mortem Needlepoint Pillow
Dogs Playing... Cards
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge
1844-1934
(perhaps more properly titled, "Dogs Smoking Cigars"!)
While the Civl War raged, Cassius "Cash" Coolidge, raised as a Quaker, began a career as a commercial artist. His parents, being farmers, could not afford formal training for Cash, but his natural artistic ability coupled with a wry sense of humor and wit served him well.
Besides producing the well know 16 piece, "Dogs Playing..." series in 1903 (which was actually commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to show dogs smoking the cigars they were adverting), it was Cash's original idea to produce life-sized carnival cut-outs where visitors frame their own face for posed photographs of themselves as comic characters. (photography was new, back then, eh?)
Pictured here is "Post Mortem" (which is how they feel after a hand of Texas Hold'em). Another of Coolidge's works, A Bold Bluff, recently sold, along with a second from the original series, for half a million dollars.
