parrot silverplate stone inlay centerpiece bowl

The parrot ranks among the first distinctive motifs Los Castillo made their own: Penny C. Morrill documents a Parrot Head Bracelet in sterling dated to circa 1940–45 (1996, p. 163), placing the bird at the center of the workshop's foundational design vocabulary. This centerpiece bowl carries that image into hollowware, translating it through stone inlay set against a silver-plate ground.

Stone inlay runs through Los Castillo's catalog across decades; Morrill records inlaid pieces with onyx and tortoiseshell alongside pre-Columbian-inspired imagery from the 1950s (1996, p. 174). The choice of silver plate rather than sterling signals a production tier the workshop maintained to bring its figural designs to a wider market without sacrificing the craft of the inlay itself. Founded in 1939 when Antonio Castillo and his brothers left William Spratling's taller, Los Castillo grew into one of Taxco's most prolific workshops, employing hundreds of artisans across a remarkable range of silver jewelry and decorative wares (Morrill, 1996, p. 168).

This piece is a useful point of reference for the breadth of decorative forms Los Castillo produced alongside their better-known jewelry lines.