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100 Francs green reverse

Issuer Banque Nationale de Belgique
Year 1906-1908
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Value 100 Francs (100 BEF)
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Reverse description Printed in green and pale yellow, with all legends in Dutch. The central vignette presents an allegorical group of four women personifying the four seasons, shown engaged in pruning, sowing, harvesting, and reaping. The statutory warning text in Dutch is set at the bottom of the composition.
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Protection type Watermark
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Comments

Constant Montald was a prominent Symbolist painter, and his involvement in designing banknote artwork for the National Bank was part of a broader Belgian effort to elevate the visual quality of its currency in the early twentieth century. Édouard Biet's engraving translates that aesthetic ambition into intaglio — a demanding conversion from a painter's idiom into a printmaker's.

P#70 spans a two-year window, 1906 to 1908, after which the design was retired in favor of updated plates. The Brussels printing works had been operational since 1851, giving the Bank unusual in-house control over production security that most contemporary European issuers still outsourced.