Round-Link Necklace with Turquoise

The necklace organizes a run of round silver links into a continuous chain, each disk carrying a small setting of turquoise so that the blue-green stone repeats along the entire length. The rhythm is steady rather than emphatic, and the effect comes from accumulation: many modest units resolving into a single flexible band. This is the visual language most associated with MATL, the workshop mark of Matilde Poulat, in which folk-derived ornament is disciplined into repeating structure. The pairing with a matching bracelet extends that logic across a set, the same link and the same stone reduced to a shorter run for the wrist.

Turquoise governs the color of the piece, its opaque blue-green interrupting the reflectivity of the silver at regular intervals. Poulat favored this stone, often combined with coral, and here it does the work of punctuation, marking each link so that the chain reads as a sequence of discrete points rather than an unbroken metal line. The round-link construction allows the necklace to bend freely and to sit close to the body, the articulation between disks giving the band its drape. At sixteen and one half inches for the necklace and seven and one quarter inches for the bracelet, the set is scaled to the neck and wrist rather than to display, and its interest lies in the ornamental treatment of each repeated element rather than in a single dominant form.

The mark recorded as MATL, Mexico, 925 places the set within the documented range of Poulat marks catalogued in Hougart's hallmark reference, where the etched-script MATL over Mexico and a 925 fineness appears among the workshop's later stamps. Poulat trained as a painter and designer at the San Carlos Academy, opened her shop in 1934, and registered MATL, a form of the Aztec word for water, as trademark number 142093. Her designs drew on Mexican folk and colonial sources rather than on the austere geometry of the Taxco modernists, and the workshop's continuity is itself notable: after her death in 1960 her nephew Ricardo Salas carried the MATL designs forward, at times supervising several dozen silversmiths. A 925 mark without the M. Reg 142093 registration line or the later MS-12 stamp is consistent with production under the MATL name, though the workshop's long life and the reuse of its designs mean that the mark alone does not fix a single year of fabrication.

Within a collection, the set documents the ornamental strand of the Mexican silver renaissance that ran alongside, and distinct from, the reductive modernism of Spratling and his successors. MATL work depends on repetition, colored stone, and folk-derived motif rather than on stripped geometry, and this round-link necklace and bracelet show that idiom in its most legible form: a single link and a single stone repeated until they become a wearable band. It records how one Mexico City workshop, founded by a trained painter, built a lasting jewelry vocabulary from Mexican decorative sources.