The First Republic (1910–1926) left Portugal a short but ornate paper-money record. At its peak sits the 50 Mil Réis of 1917, a large, allegorical design where engraving, tint and watermark choices carried the weight of state credit. To reach a finished plate, Banco de Portugal’s printer advanced through progressive proofs that isolate line work and spacing in single-color states, and then locked the approved layout as a Specimen without serials or live signatures. Those steps survive as the cleanest evidence of intent, long before tills and counters left their edits.
The pair presented here — a front progressive proof and a full specimen — captures that workflow end to end. Read together, they show how ornaments, portrait fields and guilloche were tuned, where margins were fixed, and how the security vocabulary of the Republic was set on paper. Use the filters above to pivot by type or year as this section grows with further proofs, specimens and archival pulls that document Portugal’s early twentieth-century printing at plate-true resolution.