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500 Francs 4th series, reserve banknote
| Issuer | Swiss National Bank |
|---|---|
| Year | 1949 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Red-brown intaglio design with dense guilloche borders and ornamental cartouches at each corner bearing the denomination numeral. The central vignette shows a male chemist in a laboratory coat, raising a glass flask amid an array of retorts, flasks, and distillation apparatus, with an industrial townscape visible through a window in the background. The bank title in German appears along the top border and in French along the bottom, with the Italian name lettered vertically in the left and right side panels. |
| Reverse lettering | 500 500 SCHWEIZERISCHE NATIONALBANK BANCA NAZIONALE SVIZZERA BANCA NAZIONALE SVIZZERA BANQUE NATIONALE SUISSE 500 500 ART. INSTITUT ORELL FÜSSLI AG ZÜRICH |
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| Comments |
Hans Erni was an unconventional choice for Swiss banknote design — a politically leftist artist best known for large-scale murals and Olympic posters, not the conservative allegories typical of central bank commissions. His involvement in this fourth series reflects a deliberate postwar push by the SNB toward modernist Swiss graphic identity, though the series itself was held in reserve rather than released into general circulation, functioning as a contingency issue against wartime disruption that had already passed.
Orell Füssli's continuous involvement in Swiss security printing stretches back centuries, and by 1949 the firm had refined intaglio production to a level that made their reserve stock essentially indistinguishable in tactile quality from circulating issues.