50 Francs

P#77 was issued just as Belgium entered the war in August 1914, and the timing matters enormously for survival rates. The German occupation disrupted normal banking operations almost immediately, and large quantities of circulating notes were either hoarded, confiscated, or removed from the country by refugees. Notes dated 1914 from this series consequently show up in heavily worn states far more often than issues from the preceding years.

Montald was a Belgian Symbolist painter — an unusual choice for banknote design work, and Biet's engraving had to translate that painterly sensibility into intaglio. The collaboration was not repeated under occupation-era issues.