Amethyst Wide Four Bands Bracelet

Three rows of amethyst cabochons, marshaled across parallel silver bands into a single architectural volume, make this cuff a concentrated statement of what distinguished Héctor Aguilar's work within the Taxco revival: a sculptor's approach to the bracelet, where mass, rhythm, and structure carry the design rather than surface ornament. Where much Taxco silver of the period turned to pre-Columbian glyph and folk motif, this cuff argues its case through pure form — repetition, interval, and the disciplined geometry of stone against metal.

The construction rewards close reading. Three open bands span the wrist, each set with round amethyst cabochons in individual bezels, so that the front presents an ordered field of purple punctuated by the bright lines of silver between the rows. The reverse resolves into pierced openwork, a structural lattice that lightens the considerable form and keeps the cuff wearable — evidence of a workshop thinking in three dimensions rather than simply decorating a band. The vocabulary is emphatically modern, yet the hand-set cabochons and the slight play of each bezel retain the warmth of bench work.

Amethyst was a defining stone of Aguilar's production at the Taller Borda, the workshop he ran in Taxco from 1939 until 1962. Penny Morrill's study of Aguilar documents the range of amethyst-and-silver bracelets that issued from the taller through the 1940s and 1950s — square-cut, rounded, hinged, and cabochon-set variants in 925 and 940 silver — and this cuff belongs squarely to that current, extending it into a fully stone-set, multi-row form. Morrill also records how the shop's designers used the verticality of set stones against repeating silver lines to animate a bracelet's surface, a principle this cuff carries out with particular clarity: the stones supply the rhythm, the bands the measure.

Within Aguilar's output the piece reads as the work of a mature shop at full confidence — matched cabochons, aligned rows, a finished openwork back — and as a clear expression of the sculptural modernism that gave his silver its distinct voice among the Taxco makers.