READ ‘EM AND WEEP For decades, images of dogs playing poker have enjoyed popularity and have been widely reproduced. Tomorrow, two of the pictures that started it all, oil paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge titled “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo,” will be sold at Doyle New York. The estimated price for the old boys? The pair could fetch $30,000 to $50,000.

“They are as important to American popular visual culture as James Montgomery Flagg’s painting ‘I Want You!'” a senior vice president at Doyle New York, Alan Fausel, said. “They are imbedded in the American consciousness, or as Kerry might have said, ‘seared in my memory.'” Mr. Fausel likened Coolidge’s iconic images to others by painters Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo” once belonged to noted philanthropist and real estate developer William Zeckendorf Sr.

Like William Wegman after him, Coolidge found fame anthropomorphizing pooches. In 1903, the St. Paul, Minn.-based, advertising firm of Brown & Bigelow commissioned him to create 16 paintings, most which featured dogs performing human activities.

The two originals from the series that Doyle will auction Tuesday depict a single narrative. In “A Bold Bluff,” originally called “Judge St. Bernard Stand Pat on Nothing,” a Saint Bernard, wearing a pince-nez and clutching a cigar in his right paw, holds a weak hand. He bluffs. “Waterloo” (or “Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff”) depicts the St. Bernard raking in the chips to the chagrin of his four canine compatriots. The paintings were likely renamed by Brown & Bigelow as part of a mass-marketing campaign.

More like “ubiquitously marketed,” contended Mr. Fausel when describing the proliferation of products featuring these and other Coolidge paintings.

A Web site by Joseph Richey, called “dogsplayingpoker.org,” has expounded on Coolidge’s legacy. It displays playing cards, poker chips, shirts, neckties, cufflinks, dog-food cans, pillows, plates, tapestries, ashtrays, and checks bearing on gaming dogs.

The Knickerbocker spoke with Michael McCool, of Sunnyvale, Calif., who designed a computer game in 2001 based on the famous paintings.

It sold about 75,000 copies, he said. His “3-D” game featured 21 pups, including a robot dog and at least one imposter – a cat masquerading as a dog. The animated pets could play in four rooms: a green lounge, a kitchen, a canine-themed casino with bone-shaped tables, and an executive suite complete with a jewel-encrusted fire hydrant.

The images have even inspired ESPN commercials and scenes in the cartoon Scooby Doo. A film called “4 Dogs Playing Poker,” starring Balthazar Getty, came out in 2000 – with little reference to Coolidges work other than the title.

Who was the creative genius behind these classic canvases? It’s a New York story. Coolidge was born upstate, to Quaker parents, near the town of Antwerp. He was named after a brother of presidential candidate Henry Clay, Cassius Marcellus Clay. Coolidge had many occupations before heeding his artistic vocation: He founded Antwerp’s first bank and the town’s first newspaper, the Antwerp News. He was a partner in a drug store, and patented a machine to collect street-car fares. He even worked as a school superintendent.

His illustrious illustration career included creating drawings for tobacconists, as well as sketching lightning cartoons, an entertainment where audiences paid to watch him draw very quickly. He is also credited with creating “comic foregrounds” – painted scenery on a board with a head-shaped hole through which one could pose for a photo. The person was instantly transformed into a circus figure or elegantly dressed woman. His creative talents extended to writing as well: He wrote operas. One was called “King Gallinipper” and involved a mosquito epidemic. Coolidge designed the scenery as well.

He married late in life at the age of 64, died on Staten Island, but was buried in Antwerp.

During his lifetime, Coolidge was nicknamed “Cash.” This is just what his dogs may fetch tomorrow. Mr. Fausel said given the current popularity of poker, bidding on the paintings could reach six figures.

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CARIOCA CHEMISTRY As if hosting a monthly science series downtown was not enough (see last week’s column), a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Roald Hoffman, participated recently in an evening devoted to a lively, if eyebrow-raising, mix of samba and science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Mr. Hoffman discussed his improbable participation in Rio de Janeiro’s riotous 2004 Carnival. Flashing the gleaming, spangled jacket he wore when he danced with thousands in Rio, Mr. Hoffman explained to a rapt audience how he came to hoof it up as a science adviser to Unidos da Tijuca, a neighborhood samba school whose high-minded parade theme involved a scientific fantasy.

Invited three weeks before the grand spectacle, he reluctantly canceled the classes he teaches at Cornell and flew south, where his title of professor of physical science took on kinetic meaning. “I was not invited for my body, or even for my mind, but for publicity,” he explained. He quickly learned how the buoyant, boisterous, and breathtaking samba parades during Carnival break down class barriers in an otherwise highly stratified society. His school came in second place despite tough competition.

The evening at the CUNY Graduate Center opened and closed with a head-spinning (and ear-splitting) performance by Samba New York, a percussion band led by a leading authority on Brazilian music, Philip Galinsky, whom one of the evening’s organizers, Adrienne Klein, described as the “Johnny Appleseed of samba.” Samba New York accompanied two thonged Brazilian dancers, topped by giant feathered headdresses, who shimmied sensuously to the southern beat.

Seated among the audience were philanthropists Martin and Edith Segal, Mauricio Font, head of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, and the Brazilian consul general of New York, Hon. Julio Cesar Gomes dos Santos.