5 | Spanish Banknotes

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500 Pesetas. July 1, 1884. Without series. (Edifil 2021: 290, Pick: 32). Very rare, professionally repaired. Good Very Fine.

Secretary of State under two monarchs, the Count of Floridablanca is the first politician who was not Minister of Finance to appear in the Spanish bill book. Its inclusion in the denomination of 500 pesetas and not in that of 1,000 is certainly incomprehensible, because although the Marquis of Ensenada held a higher level noble title and his reforms included the creation of the Real Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando or the Real Giro, the impact of Floridablanca on the country was notably greater: it created the General Directorate of Roads, the Supreme Board of State (future Council of Ministers) and the Imperial Canal of Aragon, it supported the independence of the United States, it participated in the War of Independence and was a driving force in the execution of the plans of Cabarrús de los Vales Reales and the National Bank of San Carlos.
At the design level, the July 1884 issue shows a clear influence of North American banknotes, both because of the central character surrounded by values ​​and because of the highest denominations with two vignettes, something that had hardly been used until then by the workshops of the Bank of Spain (there are some banknotes designed by Carlos Luis de Ribera with double vignettes but the aesthetics are far from American standards). Such is the influence of the creations of the American Bank Note Company, that, on this 500 peseta bill, the vignette used of a girl with a dog is not original, but a copy of an image engraved by Charles K. Burt, who coincidentally he had been the engraver of several of the images of the ABNC issue of 1884. That scene of the girl holding a dog, “The Pets” in the archive of the North American printing press, had been used in the previous decade on several American banknotes. . It is possible that this cartoon represents a nod to history, since if the Bank of Spain rejected working with the ABNC due to the profuse reuse of the “Young Students” scene (whose painting the Bank even bought in a vain attempt to avoid its copy), the fact that the Spanish engravers plagiarized a North American cartoon sounds like revenge.
This bill, at a collectible level, is as rare as its equivalent from the January 1884 issue, that is, very much so.