Amethyst Drop Bow Brooch

A sterling bow brooch suspending draped, trumpet-form silver drops tipped with amethyst, this is Antonio Pineda working in his most ornamental register, where silver is shaped into ribbon and movement and the stone arrives as a colored finish at the ends of the drops. The piece is recorded in Gobi Stromberg's Silver Seduction (p. 117, plate 136), placing it within the documented body of Pineda's design.

That body emerged from one of the great Taxco talleres. Pineda apprenticed in William Spratling's Las Delicias as a young man, learning under the Iguala master smiths Alfonso Mondragon and Artemio Navarrete, whom he counted as his teachers (Stromberg, p. 29), before opening his own workshop where, as Stromberg puts it, he conceived the designs and master smiths executed them in silver (p. 81). A brooch this fluently modeled is the product of that division of labor.

The hallmarks bear it out: the crown mark for Antonio Pineda, the Eagle 17 he used most often, "Made in Mexico," and an inventory number, the standard components Stromberg lays out for his work (p. 81). Pineda typically marked his silver 970, a higher purity than sterling's 92.5 percent.

For a collector, a documented, plate-illustrated Pineda brooch combining sculptural silver and amethyst is the artist at his most decorative, and a piece whose place in the literature is fixed.