In 2015 a collector paid 658,000 dollars for an 1894 oil painting now headed to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. It depicts dogs playing cards. This episode explores the life and calculated craft of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, whose Dogs Playing Poker series began as a single quirky piece and exploded in 1903 when the promotional firm Brown and Bigelow commissioned a sixteen-painting series to sell cigars, distributed on calendars and posters into barbershops, taverns, and living rooms across America.

We break down why the images endured beyond their advertising origins: Coolidge deliberately borrowed the chiaroscuro lighting of Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour and the structured confrontation of Cezanne's card players, then applied that fine-art framing to bulldogs and St. Bernards. We examine the two-part bluff narrative of A Bold Bluf ...