Jaguar Head Brooch

A brooch modeled as a jaguar head shows Héctor Aguilar drawing on Mexican imagery within the modern silver vocabulary of the Taller Borda, the Taxco workshop he directed from the late 1930s through 1962. The jaguar is a figure deep in Mexican visual tradition, and rendering it as a wearable silver form connects Aguilar's bench to the broader project of the Taxco revival, which looked to indigenous Mexican motifs as a source for a national modern style.

The brooch concentrates its effect in the sculpted head, the silver worked to give the animal its character through modeled mass rather than added detail. Made around 1940, it combines 940 silver with 990 silver, the very high purity of the secondary alloy typical of the dense, warm metal Aguilar favored.

The period (B) hallmark places the brooch within the documented run of Taller Borda production from those years.

It is recorded by Penny C. Morrill in *Silver Masters of Mexico: Héctor Aguilar and the Taller Borda* as plate I-92a, among a group of animal head pins catalogued there, securing its place in the scholarly record of Aguilar's work.

Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLos Angeles, CaliforniaOn view

Jaguar Brooch (Prendedor en forma de jaguar), circa 1940

Accession M.2015.70.2. Official museum record Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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