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25 Gulden Willem Mess
| Issuer | De Nederlandsche Bank |
|---|---|
| Year | 1931-1941 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Printed in red and multicolour, the obverse carries an intaglio portrait vignette of Willem Mess (1813–1884), president of De Nederlandsche Bank from 1863 to 1884, positioned at lower right. Guilloche underprint patterns fill the field, with the denomination and bank name inscribed across the face. The designer and printer credits appear in small lettering at the lower margin. |
|---|---|
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| Protection type | Watermark |
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| Comments |
The Willem Mess series — named after the bank's president at the time of design approval — spans a decade of issue that ended abruptly with the German occupation of May 1940, after which surviving stocks were frozen and later largely destroyed. Enschedé's Haarlem workshop had printed Dutch banknotes continuously since the nineteenth century, and this note falls squarely within their interwar output: technically conservative, deliberately difficult to counterfeit by the standards of the period.
Lion Cachet was a Dutch applied artist with a pronounced Indo-European aesthetic, unusual for central bank commissions. His involvement here was part of a broader DNB initiative in the 1920s to commission serious artists rather than career engravers.