Fish Fringe Necklace with Turquoise

Fish worked in silver and set with turquoise carry this necklace, drawing on the natural imagery that ran through the MATL repertoire. Matilde Poulat's chosen motifs, the dove and flowers among them, recalled the whimsical subjects of contemporary Mexican folk art, and a fish sits within that same family of small living things (Morrill, p. 216).

The figural approach reflects Poulat's painter's eye, trained at the San Carlos Academy before she turned to silver as part of the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic (Morrill, p. 216). The turquoise reflects the hand-carved stones Ricardo Salas prepared for the firm's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).

Fish necklaces of this kind appear in our dataset with some regularity, and they show the folk-natural strain of MATL design at fuller scale.