20 Lei

Romania's interwar stabilization program, anchored by the 1929 monetary law that formally tied the leu to gold, required a new banknote series to signal fiscal credibility to foreign creditors — this 20 Lei was part of that issue. Imprimerie Nationale in Paris handled the printing, a common arrangement for Romanian notes of the period when domestic printing capacity was considered insufficient for high-security work.

Ruffe was a prolific intaglio engraver at the Imprimerie Nationale whose work appears across multiple French colonial and client-state issues of the 1920s. The 1929 series was released almost simultaneously with the onset of the global depression, which rather undermined the stabilization it was meant to reinforce.