5000 Pesetas

Banknote commissioned by the Second Spanish Republic during the Civil War, Bank of Spain (headquarters in Barcelona). There are known samples without numbering or signatures and with numbering 000000 and CANCELLED perforation and with three circular perforations.

The first attempt to issue a banknote with a value above the legal limit of 1000 pesetas dates back to 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, in Republican territory. The need to put high denominations into circulation was covered by the issuance of the 500 and 1000 pesetas banknotes of 1928, as well as the 500 pesetas of 1935 of Hernán Cortés. However, the uncontrolled Republican inflation required moving the bar to values never seen before. That is why the Bank of Spain, already moved to Barcelona, commissioned in April 1938 the manufacture of a 5000 pesetas banknote to the English house Bradbury, Wilkinson and Cº, with which Spain had been working since 1906. Mariano Fortuny's banknote did not circulate given the dates that were handled. The order was put to print in May 1938 but the tests of color selection by layers are dated September 9, 1938, when the war was already leaning towards the National side.

Marià Fortuny i Marsal (June 11, 1838 – November 21, 1874), known more simply as Marià Fortuny, was the leading Catalan painter of his day, with an international reputation. His brief career encompassed works on a variety of subjects common in the art of the period, including the Romantic fascination with Orientalist themes, historicist genre painting, military painting of Spanish imperial expansion, as well as a prescient loosening of brush-stroke and color.