FRENCH BANK NOTES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 201, 26 August 1930, Page 19

FRENCH BANK NOTES.

DAMAGES FOR DESIGNER,

France is keeping up her reputation as the country where the arts are respected, says the Paris correspondent of a London newspaper. In what other would the National Bank be condemned to pay damages to a painter for having destroyed the artistic unity of the design of a bank note by reproducing it badly? Yet that is what the Bank of France will have to do for Luc Olivier Merson, or rather for his memory, as he is dead. His heirs, who brought the action, deliberately reduced their demand to nominal damages, and asked only that the name of the artist should be removed from the notes, as the country would have been involved in very heavy expense if the design had been withdrawn altogether.

However, the bank will have to pay a ine for every note which in future appears with the signature. No doubt the objection which the ordinary man has to the new fifty-franc note,_ which is the one in question, is not artistic, but practical, and it is that its colour is much too like that of the hundred-franc note. No doubt it is.also true that France, with all her great artistic traditions, is content to put up with postage stamps, coinage, and notes, which are nearly always artistically detestable. Nevertheless the judgment which has just been given really does some credit to her sense of artistic justice.