20 Soles

Banco La Providencia was a Peruvian private bank operating under the relatively liberal banking legislation of the early 1870s, which briefly opened the field to commercial note issuers before the War of the Pacific and subsequent fiscal collapse dismantled most of them. This note dates to a narrow window of Peruvian banking history that closed violently within a few years of issue.

The American Bank Note Company contract work for South American private banks in this period was extensive — Peru alone had several competing issuers placing orders in New York simultaneously. ABNC's intaglio printing gives these notes a quality that frequently outlasted the institutions that commissioned them.