Rounded-Link Silver Bracelet

Broad silver links with rounded ends ride above the gaps between them, joined through paired bars into a band that flexes like a length of machinery laid against the wrist. The construction is frankly mechanical, the links reading as a steady rhythm of solid and void, and the whole bracelet finished in bright silver with no applied ornament to soften the engineering.

The effect is all weight and articulation. Each rounded link sits proud of the joint below it, so light catches the curved fronts in a row of bright crescents while the openings drop into shadow. It is a machine-age idea worked in precious metal, closer to a drive chain than to the flowers and figures that fill most Taxco work of the period.

The bracelet carries the FD mark and a MEXICO SILVER stamp. Fred Davis, whose silver counter at Sanborn's in Mexico City introduced North American visitors to Mexican work from the late 1920s, did not run his own forge; as the early literature records, he had pieces like this made by independent silversmiths working to his line, drawing on the Pre-Hispanic and folk forms he studied and adapted.

Built entirely from one heavy link repeated down the band, it shows the geometric, almost industrial side of Davis's output, where the design lives in proportion and movement rather than in surface decoration.