5 Lei

Pick 19 spans a fifteen-year window — 1914 through 1929 — that encompasses Romania's entry into the First World War, the catastrophic German occupation of Bucharest in 1916–1918, and the subsequent hyperinflationary pressures of the early 1920s. Notes of this type circulated through all of it. The occupying German and Austro-Hungarian forces actually established a rival issuing body, the Banca Generală Română, specifically to drain Romanian monetary reserves; BNR issues remained the nationalist alternative, and ordinary Romanians distinguished sharply between the two.

Costin Petrescu was primarily a muralist and academic painter — his involvement in banknote design was relatively rare, and his work here predates the large-scale decorative commissions he would later receive for public buildings in interwar Bucharest.