The famous painting of boxer dogs playing poker was created by Cassius Marcellus Clay. Born in 1844 in upstate New York, he was named for his father, Kentucky Senator Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, an avid anti-slavery politician.

Cash, as his friends and family would call him, had never received any formal art training. Though, by the time he was 20, he was a draftsman and frequently had his sketches featured in the local newspaper. A short time later, he had one of his drawings published in Harpers Weekly and subsequently came to be the inventor of “comic foregrounds”, where tourists place their head through a hole in a painting, appearing to have a comical muscular body for photographs.

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