1000 Lei

Nicolae Grigorescu was a painter, not a banknote designer — his involvement here reflects the Romanian state's deliberate effort to anchor the currency in national artistic identity, drawing on his oils of peasant life and the Carpathian countryside. The actual adaptation for intaglio printing was the work of Eugène Gaspérini at the Banque de France workshops in Paris, a skilled engraver who translated painted source material into the fine-line precision that deep-impression printing demands.

The 1938–1940 date span covers a volatile period: Carol II had suspended the constitution and established his royal dictatorship in February 1938, making this note a product of that authoritarian interlude. Printing in Paris became impossible after June 1940, which effectively ended the series.