Amethyst and Silver Wave-Band Cuff

Doubled bands of silver ripple the length of this heavy cuff in a row of wave forms with round silver bosses riding the crests, while the recesses between them are oxidized to a deep gray so the polished metal stands out in hard relief. Threaded down the center runs a dense row of amethyst cabochons, their cool violet caught between the bright silver above and below, so the cuff reads as much by light and shadow as by ornament.

The vocabulary is repoussé pushed toward architecture rather than flowers. Where many Mexican cuffs of the period quote blossoms or pre-Hispanic motifs, this one is abstract: wave behind wave, the bosses set at the junctions like rivets, the amethyst beads forming a continuous line of color rather than discrete focal stones. The darkened ground does the work engraving would carry elsewhere.

It is signed FD and marked MEXICO SILVER, the marks Frederick Davis used on jewelry he sold through Sanborn's in Mexico City. Davis was a designer and merchant rather than a bench silversmith; Morrill records that he had his work fabricated by independent Mexico City workshops, among them Valentín Vidaurreta, who in the late 1930s made for Davis precisely this sort of large repoussé cuff.

The amethyst is cabochon-cut and set in a long, dense run, the densest of the treatments Davis used with the stone. As an FD-marked, amethyst-set repoussé cuff in sterling, it belongs to the work that drew Americans to serious Mexican silver before the Taxco names became famous.