NEW YORK CITY – Doyle New York’s annual Dogs in Art auction, conducted February 15, resulted in competitive bidding and new world re-cords for three artists.

Coinciding each year with the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, the auction offers two centuries of canine paintings, paintings, prints, bronzes and other objects by a variety of artists.

Highlighting this year’s sale were two rare paintings from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s 1903 series of dogs playing poker ($30/50,000). After in-tense bidding from several determined telephone and salesroom participants, the pair sold to a private collector from New York City for $590,400, setting a new world auction record for the artist.

Coolidge was born in Up-state New York in 1844 to abolitionist Quaker farmers who named him after states-man Henry Clay’s brother, Cassius Marcellus Clay. Known to friends and family as “Cash,” Coolidge appears to have had little formal art education, yet he was already sketching cartoons for his lo-cal newspaper by the time he was 20. An accomplished cartoonist, he is credited with creating the familiar life-size Boardwalk cutouts, which he called Comic Foregrounds, into which one’s head was placed so as to be photo-graphed as an amusing character.

In 1903, Coolidge contracted with the advertising firm of Brown & Bigelow of St Paul, Minn., to create 16 paintings of dogs in various humanlike situations. Nine of these paintings depicted dogs around a card table, two of which were offered at the auction. In “A Bold Bluff,” a poker-faced St Bernard with a weak hand bluffs as the dogs lay their bets, and in “Waterloo,” the St Bernard rakes in the pot much to the consternation of his fellow pooches.

In addition to the two works by Cassius Coolidge, new world auction records were set for works by Percival Leonard Rosseau and Thomas Earl.

Rosseau was often invited by his patrons to hunt and paint on their estates. Most prominent among these was Percy Rockefeller, who made Rosseau a member of his hunting club at Overhills, on his estate in Fayetteville, N.C. Rockefeller erected a studio for Rosseau on his estate and often lent his bird dogs to Rosseau as models.

Painted in 1919, “On Grassy Hill,” depicts two setters, Transue Bill and Glensale Harry, belonging to the Rocke-feller family. As one points, the other is gracefully backstanding. The entire work is handled with Rosseau’s typically vibrant brushwork. Estimated to bring $50/70,000, the painting sold for $120,000, a record price for the artist.

Other featured paintings included “Terrier in a Landscape,” attributed to Thomas Earl, which sold for $22,800, well above the estimate of $3/5,000 and a new record for Earl. An oil depicting two pointers by the German American artist Edmund Henry Osthaus sold for $39,000 and Charles Olivier Depenne’s “Hunting Dogs at Rest beneath a Tree” realized $14,400.

As in years past, the gallery hosted a special champagne brunch during the Dogs in Art exhibition to benefit a canine charity. Co-hosted with the American Kennel Club (AKC), this year’s brunch benefited DOGNY, the AKC’s charitable program that supports canine search and rescue organizations across the nation through the AKC CAR Canine Support and Relief Fund. More than 275 humans and their canine companions at-tended the event.

Doyle New York’s next auction of Dogs in Art will take place in February 2006. For information, 212-427-2730.