Throughout the long history of figurative art visual artists of all kinds have sought to capture precise moments of tension and drama and to immortalise them in a painting, photograph or even a sculpture. Often they have also tried to accentuate the emotions on display, and even reveal those that may be lying beneath the surface.

One area that has been of particular interest for many has been the playing of card games in general and poker in particular. The reasons for this are easy to see. Through the players’ expressions it is possible to discern the emotions they’re feeling, even if they’re trying to conceal them from their opponents. Then, for those who know the rules of poker, an extra layer of meaning can be provided by the hands of cards the players are holding (although the perspective of any painting means that at least some of these will always be concealed).

There is also a burgeoning number of contemporary photographers such as Fabian Grubler and Tambet Kask who are carving out a niche for themselves as experts in both capturing the precise moment when players are in the heights of elation or the depths of despair during poker tournaments. The raw emotion of some of their supremely candid portraits has to be seen to be believed. Naturally, they are always also hoping to be at the right place at the right time to witness a truly remarkable poker scene.

In the world of painting, card games have been used as a subject by artists as different as Caravaggio and Munch, De Hooch and Lautrec. While often the card game being played is not immediately obvious, the titles such as “The Bluffer”, “The Cheats” and “The Card Sharps” have a common theme – deception whether within the rules of the game or outside of them.

High art in low places
The settings of the games themselves also tend to have one thing in common – they are in shady rooms or bars often with a degree of rowdiness going on in the background. This is particularly true of the works by the Dutch masters which are painted with such authenticity that you can almost smell the wood and pipe smoke that hangs in the air and hear the ribaldry of the other drinkers.

One artist who has used the setting of the card game to examine greater truths about those who were playing it was Paul Cézanne. His famous series of paintings given the overall title of “The Card Players” was created in the later years of his life, during the 1890s, and are widely regarded to be works by an artist at the very height of his powers and worthy of standing alongside his very greatest works.

Before embarking on the five-strong series he prepared many sketches which went on to feature in the later paintings. All depict farm works from Provence, possibly who were employed on his family’s estate, playing an unspecified card game in a lowly inn. In the earlier paintings there are onlookers but, as he refined the vision that he wanted to portray, he reduced the number of players to just two sitting opposite each other, intent on concentrating on the cards in their hands.

The post-impressionist view
There have been many interpretations made regarding the paintings with a predominant line of thought being that the playing of cards is the most significant way in which the protagonists communicate with each other. Many critics have also commented on the fact that the pictures are so calm that they have more in common with still life than figurative works.

Of the five finished paintings in the series, four are on public display, two in London’s Courtauld Institute of Art where they can be compared with many of the artist’s older works, one is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the fourth is in the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. In 2011 the fifth of the set was bought by the Royal Family of Qatar for a figure believed to have been between $250 million and $320 million.

At around the same time that Cézanne was committing his card players to canvas, on the other side of the Atlantic a very different work of art was in progress, and one that definitely does feature poker. This was the first in the 18-strong series of paintings called “Dogs Playing Poker” and, while no one would claim the series to feature any masterpieces, these are surely some of the most famous paintings in the world which may be almost as well-known as works such as the Mona Lisa or the Laughing Cavalier.

Canine capers
The artist behind them was called Cassius Marcellus Coolidge and whose other major claim to fame was that we was said to have invented the so-called comic foreground – the painted figures with an aperture through which subjects could put their head and suddenly have the body of a weightlifter or seaside bather.

Coolidge had a number of jobs before he discovered painting but soon found himself very much in-demand as a commercial illustrator. The pictures were originally commissioned by an advertising agency called Brown and Bigelow to publicise a brand of cigars but they quickly became so popular in their own right that Coolidge was able to sell the originals for up to £10,000, a small fortune in the early 20th century. And, although nowhere near the record prices paid for dog paintings, in 2008 one of his larger works was sold for $602,500 by New York’s Doyle auction house.

While the paintings are often held up as the archetypes of kitsch and would never really be accepted by the academic art world, they have certainly earned a place in popular culture. For example the paintings have been referenced in TV series like The Simpsons and in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, a fake Monet was revealed to have been painted over a canvas of “Dogs Playing Poker”.

Coolidge could never have anticipated that his work would one day touch the public consciousness so completely – and no doubt it would have raised more than a small smile no matter how hard he tried to maintain a poker face.