20 Centavos / 2 Reales Banco Nacional de Colombia

The Banco Nacional de Colombia was established by the Colombian government in 1880 specifically to hold a monopoly on paper money issuance, displacing the private banks that had dominated during the earlier free-banking period. This note's dual denomination — centavos on one face, reales on the other — reflects the awkward transitional arithmetic of the 1871 decimalization, which had not yet fully displaced the old real-based accounting in everyday commerce sixteen years later.

Homer Lee operated out of New York during a relatively brief window before being absorbed into larger consolidations. Their Colombian work from this period is among the more obscure corners of their output.