Specie, a house of satirical painting
About Robber Baron
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. Robber Baron is one of its five series, and its target is the oldest one in American cartooning: the fortune that buys the referee.
The weekly we drew after
From 1877 to 1918 Puck printed its covers and centre spreads in colour from limestone, in New York. Joseph Keppler founded it; Bernhard Gillam, Frederick Opper, Friedrich Graetz and Samuel Ehrhart drew for it; and for forty years it drew the railroad men, the trusts and the senators they owned larger than life, every week, on newsstands. Its plates are in the Library of Congress and in the public domain, and four of them hang on our front page with their catalogue numbers. The Plinth Weekly borrows the manner, the crosshatch, the four flat stones and the double ruled border. It borrows none of the faces and never the name.
How Plinth is drawn
Three rules fix him, and they never vary. His belly is a perfect circle and the centre of every cover, the plum waistcoat straining at its buttons and a brass watch-chain running across it. His hands are shovels, twice the size of his head, and they do the acting while his face does not. His head is a pin on top of the circle: a round brass nose like the handle of a vault door, rust mutton-chops that stick out sideways, pince-nez, and a stovepipe hat one and a half heads tall. In a crowd every figure is drawn to its rank, so shareholders are small, committee men are smaller, and Plinth is the largest thing on the cover that is not his own house. The line is pen and crosshatch, and four flat stones of plum, brass, blue and red sit over it a millimetre off register, the way Puck came off the press.
The tycoon we did not draw
The obvious picture for this series was a white-moustached gentleman with a cane who owns a famous board game. He belongs to a toy company, so we did not draw him. Plinth is round as well, because Puck never printed a slim tycoon, so the difference lives in everything else: the mutton-chops, the brass nose, the pince-nez and the shovel hands, and never a cane, a bow tie or a white moustache. No real person, living or dead, appears on any cover.
What a caricature does
A caricature flatters only the people who commission it. On our ten covers Plinth is magnificent and everyone around him gets the satire: the shareholders at the keyhole, the committee that finds him credible, the pressmen gazing up. At a sitting the magnate is you, so the flattery is yours and the joke stays on the people in the background. Write the caption as sharp as you like; it is the one line on the cover that is not ours.
What we admit
The house opened on 12 October 2026, and no edition has sold yet. The ten covers were repainted on 13 October 2026 with an image model, from the house’s own style bible and one drawing of Plinth chosen from four trial sheets. That choice is provisional until the house’s editor confirms it or picks another, and a different pick means repainting all ten. Every cover was scored by eye before it was placed, and the masthead and captions are set in type by our own code. The hand sketches of Plinth that a copyright filing needs are not drawn yet. The canvases are giclée prints made to order by our print lab, Prodigi, and we call them that. Specie trades through PaintedApp, LLC until its own company is formed.
A letter to support@painted.app reaches a person. If you would rather see the pictures, See the Ten Covers, or Sit for Your Cover.