Numiscollect expands its Pointillism-style ‘Dot-Art’ coin series with a clever look at India’s iconic Taj Mahal

Developed by Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac, both Frenchmen working in Paris in the mid-1880’s, Pointillism was an artistic technique that built up an image using pure colours in small dots. This relied on the viewers brain to form the image in a way that was more visually striking. It caused quite a stir at the time, with even the great Vincent van Gogh claiming to have seen a “revelation of colour” after a visit to the studio where Seurat worked.

It was in 2020 that Numiscollect debuted the first in its new Dot-Art series of three-ounce silver coins. It employed the talents of smartminting to produce a design built up of small bumps struck into the coin. Each of these was then coloured, and the combination of the dot sizes, and the colours, built up a striking image of the Tree of Life.

The fifth coin in the series, released today, marks a return to architecture, first touched on with the Great Pyramid in 2022. Here, we’ve moved to one of the architectural icons of the modern world, the Taj Mahal. Built in the 17th century, it is a marble mausoleum, built to house Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, who is also interred within it.

Choosing a pastel, less intense colour scheme, the building is instantly recognisable, right down to the signature reflection in the water feature in front of the building. The Taj Mahal has been the subject of a few coins over the years, but never as uniquely as it’s depicted here. The common obverse returns, and the coin will come boxed with a Certificate of Authenticity. It has a mintage of 333 pieces, and as almost all the earlier issues have sold out at the mint, so we’d expect this one to follow. Very inventive and available to order now.