Design 5227 Brooch

The design number stamped on this brooch's reverse carries documentary weight. Morrill (Mexican Silver, 1994) notes that the numbered inventory system Margot used alongside other Taxco makers runs from lower numbers at the start of practice toward higher ones, placing a designation in the five-thousands within the sustained creative middle-to-late phase of her taller.

Champlevé enamel on sterling silver was the medium Morrill identifies as central to her production — "Reveriano Castillo and Miguel Melendez initiated the champlevé technique of enamel-on-silver which Margot perfected and developed into one of her major lines of jewelry" (p. 166). That work was tightly controlled: Margot personally designed everything her workshop produced, writing specific instructions for each piece that detailed the number of dies, the color options for enameling, and how the piece was to be assembled and finished. Her enamelers worked from those drawings and notes, and her insistence on meticulous technique yielded a high level of workmanship for every piece she signed (Morrill, p. 168).

Morrill documents pins explicitly among her enamel forms, drawing from Pre-Columbian motif, Art Deco linearity, and Japanese formal sources absorbed during two trips to Japan in the late 1950s (p. 168).