Dispatch · April 21, 2026
The Jill and Byron Crawford Collection at Bonhams
One couple's Taxco Golden Age jewelry — 119 lots across every major workshop of the era — cleared through two Bonhams sales in 2022 and 2023. The results are a cleaner benchmark for the middle of the market than collectors remember.
6 min read · Updated July 21, 2026
In the right-hand column of Bonhams' November 10, 2022 Artist Jewelry catalog, under the unfussy provenance line Property From The Jill And Byron Crawford Collection, twenty-two lots of Taxco Golden Age silver crossed the block. Seven months later, on June 8, 2023, another ninety-seven lots from the same collection followed. Between the two sales the Crawfords placed 119 pieces of Mexican modernist jewelry back into the market. The combined hammer was $112,305.
That number is the first surprise. Collectors who remember these sales remember them as a landmark; the hammer totals say they were something less dramatic than that, and more useful for it.
What sold in the Crawford Collection sales?
The Crawford holdings were jewelry, not hollowware. The breakdown across both Bonhams sales:
- 57 bracelets
- 20 necklaces
- 10 pendants and bolos
- 8 pins and brooches
- 4 rings
- 15 mixed-maker jewelry group lots
- 2 jewelry sets
- 2 silver plates and a pair of cuff links
By maker, the distribution of lots and value is not what the Spratling-centric telling of this sale suggests:
| Maker | Lots | Total hammer | Median | Top |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| William Spratling | 37 | $31,939 | $608 | $4,462 |
| Antonio Pineda | 30 | $36,040 | $1,120 | $4,462 |
| Hector Aguilar | 10 | $9,203 | $718 | $2,432 |
| Los Castillo | 5 | $8,922 | $512 | $7,040 |
| Salvador Terán | 2 | $3,200 | $1,600 | $2,176 |
| Margot de Taxco | 3 | $1,696 | $576 | $768 |
| Unattributed / mixed-maker lots | 32 | $21,306 | $592 | $2,048 |
Spratling led by count, but Pineda led by total value and by a factor of nearly two in median — the clearest signal in the two sales. A collector working a Pineda hypothesis would have cleared a typical Pineda Crawford lot at roughly $1,100; the equivalent Spratling lot at $600. The Crawfords owned more Spratling; the market valued their Pineda more.
What were the top lots in the Crawford Collection?
Among 119 results, three are worth a careful look — each from a different workshop, each either a price record for the day or a public cue about what that maker's ambitious work now clears.
Lot 86 (June 2023): Los Castillo silver necklace, circa 1940. $7,040 against an $800–1,000 estimate. The top Crawford lot in either sale. A heavily worked pre-Columbian-motif bib pendant supported by oval spiral-motif links — pictured above. The piece is catalogued to 1940, which places it at or before Antonio Castillo's split from the Spratling workshop to found Los Castillo as an independent taller. Bonhams estimated it as a mid-grade Los Castillo piece; the hammer was seven to nine times that. The significance is that very early, documented Los Castillo hollowware-scale jewelry surfaces almost never, and when it does the market will pay through an estimate set for later, more common workshop output.
Lot 82 (November 2022): William Spratling "Needle Necklaces" obsidian necklace. $4,462 against a $3,000–5,000 estimate. An example of Spratling's well-known radial dart-pendant design, using black sheen obsidian alternated with silver. Sold in the top third of the estimate, which is to say the market honored the estimate without excitement. The companion lot 81 — the gold-sheen obsidian variant of the same design — sold for $3,187 at the same $3,000–5,000 estimate. Useful for pegging the going rate on a named Spratling jewelry design: roughly $3,000 to $4,500 for a good example in 2022.
Lot 55 (November 2022): Antonio Pineda silver and amethyst bracelet. $4,462 against a $1,500–2,000 estimate. A 2.2x over-high result. Pineda amethyst bracelets are not rare. This one cleared at more than double its estimate because the Crawford provenance sat on the lot, because the amethyst was well set, and because Pineda's mid-market has been quietly firming. A second Pineda amethyst bracelet in the same sale — lot 63, a cultured pearl cuff — sold for $1,402 against a $600–800 estimate, another 1.75x over high.
How did the Crawford sales perform against estimates?
Across the 119 lots, the estimate-to-hammer picture is mixed: 26% of lots sold above high estimate, 38% sold within the estimate range, and 36% sold below low estimate. That is closer to a routine mid-market dispersion than a hot sale — modest results with a few stars. The top-10 lots account for $32,300, or 29% of the combined hammer, a normal concentration for a catalog this size.
Nothing in the Crawford sales set a category record. The 2014 Heritage sale of a 42-piece Spratling Amarres-pattern flatware service cleared $27,500 against comparable Crawford-era Spratling jewelry peaking at $4,462. A 2022 Heritage pair of Spratling silver spurs cleared $16,250. If the Crawford sales were a landmark, they were a landmark for the middle of the Taxco market — the bracelets and necklaces and pendants most collectors actually own and trade — not for the top.
How do you use Crawford prices to value a Taxco piece today?
The Crawford prices are a published, provenanced, timestamped cross-section of Taxco Golden Age jewelry prices as of November 2022 and June 2023. For anyone trying to price a piece today, they are more useful than a single headline sale would be, because they cover the full surface of the category:
- Pineda bracelets with a stone (amethyst, obsidian, jade, moonstone, pearl): the Crawford median was $1,280 with a top of $4,462. A Pineda bracelet priced over $5,000 in 2024–2025 needs a reason — exceptional stone, unusual design, unusual provenance — or it's ahead of the Crawford curve.
- Spratling obsidian and hardstone necklaces in the "radial" or "needle" tradition: Crawford cleared the named examples at $3,187–$4,462. Comparable sales at over $5,500 imply either a better-than-Crawford example or a buyer paying forward.
- Aguilar silver bracelets (the ones that weren't the stamped 990 variants we wrote about separately): the Crawford median was $718, top $2,432. A Crawford-provenance Aguilar hit $2,048 for a c.1945 pair; that's roughly the top of ordinary expectation for this form factor in this era.
- Los Castillo pre-1945 hollowware-scale silver: Crawford cleared one piece at $7,040 against a $1,000 estimate. On a sample of one, don't generalize — but the gap between estimate and hammer is a flag to auction houses that early Los Castillo is priced behind where the market now wants it.
Are Crawford Collection prices a reliable benchmark?
The Crawford hammers do not set category peaks. A "Crawford comp" is a mid-market benchmark, not a top-of-market one. When a seller or dealer cites "Crawford Collection" pricing to support a current asking price, it's worth asking whether the comparison is apples-to-apples: a fair-condition Pineda amethyst bracelet, not a piece with exceptional stones or literature; a common Spratling design, not a one-off; a Los Castillo from the workshop's ordinary output, not a 1940 pre-independence piece.
The two sales did establish one thing clearly: Pineda was the artist where the Crawfords' holdings were most valuable per lot, more valuable on average than their Spratling. That alignment — Pineda higher than Spratling on a per-piece basis in a mid-market collection — is a signal worth tracking as more well-provenanced Taxco collections come to market over the next few years.
Where can you see the Crawford Collection auction results?
- Bonhams Artist Jewelry sale 27697, November 10, 2022 — 22 Crawford lots
- Bonhams Artist Jewelry sale 29172, June 8, 2023 — 97 Crawford lots
- Each Crawford lot's Bonhams catalog entry carries the full lot text, photograph, and hammer price — searchable on Bonhams' public site and archived in this project's auction-records database.
Sources
- Bonhams Artist Jewelry, sale 27697, November 10 2022. 22 lots from the collection of Jill and Byron Crawford. Catalog and hammer prices public.
- Bonhams Artist Jewelry, sale 29172, June 8 2023. 97 lots from the collection of Jill and Byron Crawford. Catalog and hammer prices public.
- Museum of Mexican Silver auction-records dataset, retrieved April 2026. 119 Crawford lots matched on the provenance line "Property From The Collection Of Jill And Byron Crawford" (spelled variously across the two catalogs). Artist attribution, hammer, estimate, and lot-level titles are from Bonhams' own catalog entries.
- Comparative data on Heritage Spratling hammers (cited to contextualize Crawford results against category peaks): 2014 sale of the 42-piece Amarres pattern flatware service at $27,500; 2022 sale of a William Spratling silver spurs pair at $16,250; 2021 sale of a Spratling punch bowl at $16,250. All from Heritage Auctions, catalog entries public.
More in Dispatches
Why Mexican Modernism Is Modern Art
Alexander Calder's jewelry was received as art the moment he made it, because he was already known as a sculptor. The Taxco school had no such advocate, and a half-century of mid-century Mexican silver has been miscategorized as vintage jewelry rather than what it is: modern sculpture.
How Rare Is William Spratling, Anyways?
Spratling is the most famous name in twentieth-century Mexican silver. Las Delicias was, in its peak years, the largest silver workshop in Mexico. None of that means his pieces are easy to find today. Across the 2,094 named-Spratling lots that have crossed a published auction since 2007, the median clears at $750, the top decile at $2,600, and only fourteen have ever cleared $10,000. Production was numerous. Survival is not.
The Value of Collecting the Taxco Golden Age
Taxco silver has beauty, history, scarcity, and market inefficiency in the same place. The auction record across 1,156 weighable Golden Age lots, with each lot's melt value computed at the silver spot in effect on the day it sold, shows the spread: a typical Spratling or Pineda piece clears at roughly ten times its silver weight, the best examples clear sixty to a hundred times, and the same makers' hollowware regularly sells below melt at the wrong auction. The drift between the metal floor and the recognition ceiling is the entire opportunity.