1000 Gulden Grietje Seel

The "Grietje Seel" nickname — a diminutive of Margaretha — came from Dutch public slang for this high-denomination note, a habit the Dutch had of personalizing large banknotes with women's names. At a thousand gulden, this was serious money; the average Dutch industrial worker in 1920 earned perhaps 600 to 800 gulden annually. Notes of this value rarely passed through ordinary hands, and surviving examples that show genuine circulation wear are the exception.

De Nederlandsche Bank printed this series in-house at Amsterdam, one of the few European central banks of the period with the internal infrastructure to do so. The watermark remains the sole security feature — a relatively modest protection for such a high face value.