50 Centavos

The Banco Nacional de la República de Colombia was established by law in 1880 as a state monopoly issuer, replacing the chaotic network of private banks that had flooded the country with inconvertible paper. This 50 Centavos note belongs to the bank's earliest emission period, when the government was still attempting to enforce par convertibility — a policy that collapsed definitively by 1885 amid the civil war known as the War of a Thousand Days' precursor conflicts.

Homer Lee operated out of New York for barely a decade before being absorbed into larger consolidations, making their Colombian commissions among the few surviving examples of their work in Latin American fiscal printing.