Shield Link Necklace with Turquoise Cabochons

A rare variant of the famous shield link necklace. The design, dated to about 1940 to 1945, comes from the early years in which Héctor Aguilar was defining the link vocabulary that would run through his Taxco silver.

The necklace is made in sterling silver and stamped with Aguilar's conjoined HA mark together with the 940 standard and the Taxco origin, the workshop signatures that identify his output. The pierced half-oval links lighten the metal visually while the incised connecting bands give the piece its measured, regular rhythm.

That structural logic, links and joins treated as the design itself, was the foundation of the work Aguilar produced at the Taller Borda. A collar of this early date shows the form in its formative phase, before the heavier later styles, and stands as a clean example of his approach to building a necklace from a single repeated link.

The stones: the photograph confirms that turquoise is present, so the title is correct and Materials have been amended accordingly. Small round turquoise cabochons are set in low bezels along the incised connecting bands, one stone between each pair of shield links, so that a continuous line of blue runs the length of the collar between the two rows of pierced silver shields. The stones are decorative punctuation rather than focal elements; the pierced links still carry the composition. Neither the earlier Materials field nor the earlier note mentioned them.

One point still to reconcile: this note describes the object as sterling while also recording a 940 standard mark. Materials are entered as 940 silver on the authority of the mark described here; a photograph of the stamp would settle it.