About The Hoard

The house

Specie is a house of satirical painting, and its subject is money. We hold that money is the funniest subject in painting, and that the people who have the most of it know the joke best. The Hoard is one of its five series, and the one that asks the plainest question: what would you do with more gold than you could ever spend?

The miser we did not paint

The obvious picture for this series was a famous cartoon miser who dives into his money every morning. He belongs to a film studio, so we did not paint him, and we did not paint anything that looks like him. We went back to the older source instead: the nightcap and the threadbare gown are from Dickens, published in 1843, and the habit of collecting every shiny thing in sight is a magpie's. Magnus Pye is the result, and he is ours.

The vault

Every miser needs somewhere to keep it. Magnus keeps his in a round municipal lido, the kind every town built in the 1930s, drained in a dry summer and never refilled. White tile, black lane lines, painted depth markings: the site is dressed in the same materials, because the pool is the joke. The spec sheet on the front page works out how many coins it holds from the size of the pool and the size of a coin, and the last line is always the same.

What we admit

The house opened on 12 October 2026 and no edition has sold yet. The fourteen paintings were rendered with an image model from a brief we wrote, then chosen by eye; the hand sketches of Magnus that a copyright filing needs are not drawn yet. Specie trades through PaintedApp, LLC until its own company is formed. The prints are giclée prints on canvas from a lab we chose for its colour, and we call them that.

If you would rather see the pictures than read about them, See The Dives.