C.M Coolidge

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge is the man behind the dogs playing poker. His paintings show dogs sitting round card tables, smoking cigars, bluffing and cheating, rendered with the straight face of a genre painter, and that deadpan humour is why they are still so widely known.

He was born in Antwerp, New York, in 1844 and had a varied career as a druggist, sign painter and newspaper founder before he turned to art. He also invented the comic foreground, the cut-out board where people put their face through a hole to be photographed on a cartoon body. Between the mid 1900s and mid 1910s he painted a series of dog pictures for the advertising firm Brown and Bigelow, which sold them as prints and calendars.

A Friend in Need, with one dog passing an ace under the table, and A Bold Bluff are the best known of the set. He died on Staten Island in 1934.