Amethyst and Silver Hinged Bracelet

A single oval amethyst, domed and unfaceted and lightly veiled with white, sits at the center of a squared silver plaque, dropped into a stepped recessed bezel so the stone reads as the still point of an architectural frame. That contrast is the whole idea: the broad plaque is severe and machine-clean, while the cabochon, left rough-skinned and full of color, keeps the hand and the earth in the design.

The plaque rides on hinged silver links that articulate around the wrist and close at scalloped, notched terminals with a slide clasp, so a heavy frontal element stays wearable. It is jewelry conceived as small sculpture for the wrist rather than a mount for a gem — geometric, frontal, built on the play of polished metal against one dome of native stone.

The bracelet is signed with the FD cipher, the F tucked inside the D, and carries the early MADE IN MEXICO word mark rather than the standardized sterling stamps used later, placing it early in Frederick Davis's jewelry production. Davis designed under his own name but did not himself fabricate; his pieces were made in contracted Mexico City workshops, chief among them Valentín Vidaurreta's, where a young Antonio Pineda apprenticed. Morrill records amethyst bracelets and a cuff of this character under the FD mark, around 1930.

By the early 1930s Davis ran the antiques and fine-crafts department at Sanborn's, through which much of this jewelry reached its audience, and his immersion in pre-Columbian and folk material gives even his most reductive silver its weight.