Strip window display melds poker, politics

Melissa Arseniuk

The staff at Villa Reale placed election-themed paintings in the store’s window.

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008 | 1:45 a.m.

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The staff at Villa Reale erected a particularly political window display for Election Day.

It placed two similar but polarized paintings in the window. Both were created by artist Andy Thomas and showed politicians playing poker around a single table, but one featured past presidents from the Republican Party and the other had Democrats.

“(Thomas’) main body of work is westerns, horses,” sales associate Todd Esquivel said. “For him to come out of the box like this is really quite something -- and he hit it.”

“True Blues” includes Presidents Jimmy Carter, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, while “Grand Ol Gang” includes Presidents George H. W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

Both paintings had political forefathers in the forefront -- Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans and Andrew Jackson for the Democrats.

“They’re fantastic,” Esquivel said of the prints.

President Bush isn’t seated at the card table in “Grand Ol Gang.” Instead, he is standing behind Reagan, looking in on the action from over his shoulder.

“They’re not allowing him to play the game,” Esquivel observed with a chuckle. “I don’t know why.”

Villa Reale has sold about a dozen of the prints, which the Forum Shops store sells for $2,195 each.

“People are buying both just because they’re great conversation pieces,” Esquivel said, noting about a third of his customers bought both prints.

A Canadian customer also purchased a set but the vast majority of sales came from various cities scattered across the U.S. The vast majority of his customers aren’t from Las Vegas, he said.

He said sales have been on both sides of the political spectrum, but recent sales have followed national polls.

“It started off strong with Republicans,” he said, “but now I’d say the Democrats are leading in sales.”