Oval Spiralwork Picture Frame with Turquoise and Amethyst

Beyond jewelry, the MATL workshop produced silver objects for the home, and this turquoise-and-amethyst picture frame sits in that wider output. The taller's range was unusually broad: Ricardo Salas recalled that they made three thousand types of silver jewelry alongside roughly one hundred religious pieces, and decorative objects extended the same hand-wrought, stone-set manner to functional form (Morrill, p. 216).

The frame carries the silver-and-hardstone language Matilde Poulat developed after she turned from painting, which she had studied at the San Carlos Academy, to silver. Her designs grew out of the post-Revolution cultural project that looked to Pre-Conquest and pueblo sources, and the inlaid turquoise and amethyst belong to that palette (Morrill, p. 216).

The carving and setting of the stones reflect skills perfected in the workshop, where Salas learned to work coral, turquoise, and other hardstones for the firm's jewelry and figures (Morrill, p. 216).

Frames of this type appear with some regularity in our dataset, more often than the rarer one-off MATL forms, making them a comparatively accessible way into a body of work better known for its jewelry.