Hummingbird-Handled Pitcher

The hummingbird, native to Mexico's highland flora, appears here on a silver-plate pitcher — hollowware of a kind that Los Castillo produced alongside its better-known jewelry, extending a naturalistic design vocabulary from the wearable to the domestic table.

From its founding in 1939 the Los Castillo workshop pursued genuine breadth of production, running what Morrill terms an orfebrería — the section of a taller given over to larger objects like pitchers, trays, and coffee sets — in parallel with its jewelry lines. Designers including Jorge (Chato) Castillo and Salvador Terán drove the workshop's inventive range; Morrill credits them with providing "the impetus for innovation that has been the hallmark of Los Castillo" (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 166). Silver plate rather than sterling places this pitcher in a service-oriented tier of that output, built for use at the table as much as for display.

A piece that pairs a clearly rendered Mexican motif with a functional form reflects the taller's sustained reach beyond ornament.