50 Bolívares

Venezuela's postwar economic expansion, fueled by oil revenues under the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, demanded a modernized currency series in the early 1950s. Thomas De La Rue produced this and the associated denominations at a moment when the bolívar was genuinely one of the stronger currencies in the Western Hemisphere — the official rate held close to 3.35 per US dollar throughout the decade.

Pick 40 belongs to a series that remained in production and circulation across multiple administrations, making clean date attribution sometimes tricky for individual specimens. The watermark is the primary security concession on an otherwise straightforward intaglio production.