10 Lei Ministry of Finance

Romania turned to the American Bank Note Company for this 1920 issue because the country's own printing infrastructure had been badly disrupted during the First World War — German occupation of Bucharest between 1916 and 1918 had stripped or damaged much of the capital's administrative apparatus. The Ministry of Finance, rather than the Banca Națională, issued these notes directly, a practical workaround during a period when the central bank's own emission capacity was still being reconstituted.

Costin Petrescu was primarily a painter and muralist, later responsible for the interior decoration of the Ateneul Român. His involvement in banknote design was relatively brief but fell during this transitional post-war period when Romania was assembling new national imagery for an expanded state that had just absorbed Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina.