Design 5147 Bracelet

Design 5147 belongs to the sculptural, stone-set side of Margot de Taxco's practice rather than to the enamel line for which she is most often remembered, and it is among the more openly romantic of her bracelet designs. The form is a bypass cuff, its two ends sweeping past one another across the top of the wrist in a pair of large opposed volutes, each scroll unfurling from a spiral eye and trailing into a cluster of marquise-cut amethysts set like petals or flame at the terminals. Beaded silver granulation runs along the scrolls, catching light against the smooth polished bands, so that the piece reads at once as foliate and as pure abstract motion. The number 5147 places it within the numbered catalogue through which Margot organized and reproduced every design in her workshop.

The bracelet's importance lies in how completely it commits to the scroll as a structural idea. The whole cuff is generated from the volute: the spiral is not applied ornament but the armature of the form, the two coiling ends providing both the sculptural drama and the practical spring that lets the open cuff grip the wrist. That reliance on the curling, calligraphic line ties the design to the deep Taxco vocabulary of the repoussé scroll, the same silvered baroque energy that runs through the region's finest work, here tightened and made to serve a single sweeping gesture. Against that silver movement the amethysts do specific work: their cool violet, faceted to throw light where the silver only reflects it, supplies the color accent and the focal weight at the ends of each scroll, and the choice of a hardstone rather than fired enamel shows Margot reaching for the same jewel-toned drama by other means.

Set within the Taxco silver renaissance, 5147 shows the movement's characteristic fusion of a modern designer's discipline with an older decorative exuberance. Morrill and Stromberg both describe the Taxco designers drawing on Pre-Columbian form, colonial and popular Mexican ornament, and international modern currents, and this bracelet's marriage of granulated, scrolling silver to bright cabochon and faceted stone belongs squarely to that eclectic tradition, the sort of stone-and-silver statement cuff that defined the region's ambitious jewelry of the mid-century. The bypass construction and the emphatic, asymmetrical sweep give it a boldness of scale that reads as thoroughly modern even as the beadwork and volutes look back to a baroque handcraft.

No production total for design 5147 is documented. The design number confirms 5147 as a distinct model in Margot's inventory, and amethyst-set silver cuffs of this ambition were labor-intensive objects, made in far smaller numbers than simpler production jewelry. The design's appeal to serious collectors rests on its confident sculptural presence and on the clear evidence of hand-work, the granulation, the fitted stones, the balanced opposition of the two scrolls, that marks it as a considered studio piece rather than a stock pattern.