The House

Trust Fund is one of five houses of Specie, a house of satirical painting. Each house takes one way of having money and paints it the way the people who have it would like it painted. This one takes the oldest way, which is being born to it.

The heir is the most painted subject in Western art and the least laughed at. Gainsborough painted a boy in blue satin, and two centuries of visitors have admired the satin. Every old school in England has an honours board with the same few surnames on it, generation after generation. We draw Fordham Fairweather IV in the cheerful line of a ten-cent comic and keep him grave: his great-grandfather’s blazer, two sizes too big, a signet ring, a silver rattle. Drawn in oils, a grave child in adult clothes becomes sentiment. Drawn like this, the gravity is the punchline, and it is in plain sight.

Who It Is For

We know who buys this. A collector who hangs Fordham over the fireplace sees a solemn little boy, or sees the joke, and the ones we paint for see both at once. Money is the funniest subject in painting, and the people who have the most of it know the joke best. If the picture only flatters you or only mocks you, we painted it wrong.

The Game

Primogeniture is a board game that never existed, drawn as if it had been in the family for a century. It is played in the manner of the Game of the Goose, the race to the centre printed in Italy by 1597: sixty-three squares, a roll of the dice, and one house rule. Players move in birth order, and the eldest moves first, always. The tokens are a rattle, a polo mallet, a tiara, a yacht and a signet ring. The last square is the reading of the will.

Every square on the board is drawn blank. On your Family Board, twelve of them carry your family’s own places, set in type so every name is spelled right.

What We Are, Plainly

The house is new, and no edition has sold yet. The pictures are made in our studio with an image model, drawn in the clear line of a 1950s children’s comic, directed from a style bible a person wrote, and checked by eye against its five rules. They are not painted by hand, and we never say they are. The hand sketches the heirs ought to start from are not drawn yet; when they are, we will show them here.

Every canvas is a giclée print on canvas, made to order by our print lab and stretched on a 38 mm bar. Each piece is an edition of 25 canvases, numbered in the order they are bought and entered on the ledger, and when all 25 numbers are taken or retired the piece closes. A refunded number is struck and retired, never sold again, so an edition can close at fewer than 25. An edition of 25 is a count of canvases and promises nothing about a price.

The Heirs Are Invented

Fordham, the twins, the girl with three surnames and the boy who is afraid of his racehorse are characters. None is a real child, and none is drawn from one. Any likeness to a living family is a coincidence, though we understand if a few families find one.