Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was born on September 18, 1844, in Antwerp, New York, the son of Quaker abolitionists who had moved north to farm and to wait out the slavery question. He left for the local newspaper trade in his twenties and never returned to farming. He died ninety years later in Manhattan, having lived through the Civil War, the invention of the lightbulb, and the Great Depression.
Between those bookends he ran a drugstore in Antwerp, founded the town's bank, edited a weekly paper in Rochester, painted street signs in Buffalo, and patented a folding photo prop called the "comic foreground" — the wooden cutout where you stick your face through the painted body of a strongman or a bathing beauty. The comic foreground is still a fixture of state fairs a hundred and twenty years later. It is, on a population-adjusted basis, the most-used invention of his life.
The St. Paul Commission
The Brown & Bigelow Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, was in 1903 the largest printer of advertising calendars in the United States. Their business model is worth pausing on: a bank or a feed store or a cigar shop would order ten thousand calendars with their name printed at the bottom, and Brown & Bigelow would deliver them in December for distribution to customers. The calendar was the late-Victorian equivalent of the email signature — a small piece of branded ephemera that lived in someone's kitchen for a year.
The calendars needed images. Brown & Bigelow employed a stable of commercial illustrators to produce them. Coolidge was already in his late fifties, semi-retired from the New York newspaper trade, and looking for a commission. He proposed a series of oil paintings of dogs in human situations. Brown & Bigelow agreed to sixteen.
The exact financial terms are not recorded in any source we can verify. Conservative estimates put his total earnings from the series in the range of $8,000 to $10,000 over seven years — meaningful money in 1903 but not transformative. The paintings were corporate property. He did not receive royalties when the calendars went on to sell in the millions.
He was sixty when he started the series. By sixty-six he had finished it. He spent the remaining thirty years of his life on other projects no one remembers.— On the timing of the commission
The Painter's Hand
Coolidge was a self-taught oil painter working in the late-nineteenth-century commercial-illustrator tradition. He owed obvious debts to Sir Edwin Landseer, the Victorian English painter who had spent his career anthropomorphizing dogs and stags, and to the genre-painting tradition of Dutch and Flemish tavern scenes from two centuries earlier. His compositions are sturdier than the calendar format required and his lighting is consistently more careful than critics have credited.
What he was not was a portraitist of dogs as dogs. The animals in his paintings are types — bulldog, St. Bernard, collie, beagle — performing as character actors. The bulldog is always the working-class anchor of the table. The St. Bernard is always the magnanimous senior figure. The collie is the schemer. Read the paintings as Edwardian sitcom casting and they make immediate sense.
After the Calendar
Coolidge continued painting after 1910 but never on commission of this scale. He moved with his wife and daughter from Brooklyn to a brownstone on West 75th Street in Manhattan. He invested in patents — the photo prop, several inventions related to the early ad industry — and lived comfortably enough on the residuals.
He died on January 24, 1934, of unspecified causes, at age 89. He is buried in Westmount Cemetery in Brooklyn. His obituary in the New York Times ran to four paragraphs and mentioned the dogs only in passing.
The Long Reputation
The Coolidge paintings have undergone three reputational cycles. From 1903 to roughly 1950 they were popular commercial calendar imagery — widely distributed, unremarked upon by anyone with an art-history credential. From 1950 to 1990 they were a punchline — the canonical example of bad American kitsch, taught in undergraduate aesthetics seminars as the thing serious art was not. Since 1990 they have been undergoing a third revaluation, this one closer to honest: a competent commercial illustrator working at the dawn of the modern advertising agency, doing better work than the format demanded, on subject matter that turned out to outlast almost everyone he was competing with on the bookstore wall.
The 2005 Sotheby's sale of A Bold Bluff and A Waterloo for $590,400 was the formal end of phase two. It is now possible to write about Coolidge without ironic distance, which is what this site attempts to do.
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