(via blog: A Friend in Need)

The pre­vi­ous­ly blogged Venge­ful Tiger, Glow­ing Rab­bit post lead me to this paint­ing. Pulling this from a blog where it is accom­pa­nied by the fol­low­ing reflections:

Most of them appear to have their own sep­a­rate per­son­ail­i­ties.  The one on the far left is a chuck­ling son of a bitch(literally), he’s just there to have a good time and pre­tend he’s peo­ple, then we go into the more seri­ous play­ers like the one in the mid­dle.  He’s not there to fuck around, he wants your dog mon­ey so he can go and gam­ble it away on the peo­ple races.  That’s what dogs would do in this par­al­lel uni­verse, right?

The writer of Venge­ful Tiger… has a dif­fer­ent perspective:

Cas­sius Coolidge’s famous paint­ing of dogs play­ing pok­er, “A Friend in Need” (cir­ca 1903 and still going strong), typ­i­fies the ret­ro­grade con­scious­ness that a more enlight­ened cul­tur­al pub­lic will, per­haps, some­day transcend.

Coolidge’s weird image has been repro­duced end­less­ly in cig­ar ads, on cal­en­dars, on throw rugs, and in vel­vet. Dogs can­not sit on chairs around a card table in the way that Coolidge depicts; they would not want to. But Coolidge has made them.

The punch line of this paint­ing, and the eth­i­cal harm of it, is the dis­junc­tion between what is depict­ed and our real­iza­tion that dogs do not smoke cig­ars or gam­ble. Dumb dogs. But we have made them do so. Clever us. It reminds me of the Web site that sug­gests that if a cat could talk, what she would say is, “I can has cheezburg­er?” (LOL!) Coolidge rei­fies the fan­ta­sy that ours is the best of all pos­si­ble worlds, and that oth­er species could do no bet­ter than to emu­late humans, how­ev­er ridicu­lous they might seem in so doing, and how­ev­er for­eign our human­i­ty may be to their animality.

I would be less offend­ed by Coolidge if he, or oth­er artists, also cre­at­ed art that involved human ani­mals in the guise and con­text of non­hu­man ani­mals (and did so with­out cast­ing asper­sion on the “swin­ish,” “beast­ly” humans so represented)—that is, if there were a reci­procity that bespoke a sin­cere desire to broach the species bar­ri­er and see how the oth­er half lives. But that wouldn’t sell many cigars.

My per­spec­tive? I’m not tak­en in by the paint­ing. It does, how­ev­er, remind me of this obser­va­tion in Ecce Can­is:

…the dog was often tak­en as the ide­al test sub­ject not just because of the rel­a­tive sim­i­lar­i­ty of its inter­nal anato­my to ours, but also because its expres­sions of pain or dis­plea­sure are for us so easy to read and understand.

Which is to say: painter­ly exper­i­men­ta­tion on dogs like this works, because a nat­u­ral­is­tic ren­der­ing of canine faces still allows us to inter­pret the intend­ed character.