Design 5247 Bracelet

Design 5247 belongs to the numbered catalog of bracelets that Margot van Voorhies Carr produced under the Margot de Taxco mark, and it falls within the enamel-on-silver line that Morrill identifies as central to her mature reputation. The form of this particular number is not documented. What the record holds is a sterling bracelet, entered in her inventory as an enameled design and made within the system of standardized, repeatable models that governed her shop: the disciplined, numbered enamel production that distinguished Margot from her Taxco contemporaries.

Margot worked in champlevé, the technique in which recessed silver cells are flooded with vitreous enamel and fired, and Morrill records that she developed her enamel silverwork into a signature marked by color, texture, and a high standard of technical finish. Each design in her catalog was a resolved model, engineered to be reproduced by the smiths of her taller to a consistent result, which is what the design number itself records: not a unique object but a fixed, repeatable statement in enamel and silver. A bracelet, worn at the wrist and subject to constant use, tested that engineering directly, since the enamel had to survive flexion and contact — one reason her enamel bracelets are prized when they reach us with their glaze intact.

Historically the design sits within the enamel program that Morrill sets against Margot's wider field of sources. She drew, in her account, on Pre-Columbian motif and the international Art Deco line — the two, she notes, being compatible in her hands — as well as on Japanese decorative art absorbed on trips late in the 1950s and the curling forms of Parisian Art Nouveau and Taxco's Santa Prisca. Any numbered enamel bracelet of hers is an application of that visual intelligence to the champlevé medium, part of the broader Taxco achievement that Stromberg describes as the movement's continual exploration of far-reaching design possibilities within a distinctly modern sensibility.

No production total for design 5247 is documented. Margot's enamels survive less readily than her plain silver, because the vitreous surface chips and abrades with wear, so that intact examples of any given enamel bracelet design tend to be scarcer than the original output would suggest. Her numbered enamel bracelets are, as a class, among the collectible core of her work, valued for compressing her signature technique into a wearable, everyday format.