Double Curl Bracelet with Graduated Dots

This bracelet concentrates its design on the front of the wrist, where two large rounded curls swell outward from the band and turn inward in opposing spirals. The forms are not drawn as flat ornament. They are built as volume, with repoussé giving the silver a buoyant, rounded pressure and the darkened channels setting off each curve. A row of graduated raised dots at the outer edges changes the tempo of the surface: small repeated points against broad, inflated scrolls. The result is a cuff that depends less on motif than on relief, shine, and the measured alternation of mass and interval.

The scale is part of the design. At 6 5/8 inches around, with a front height of 2 1/8 inches, the bracelet makes the wrist a support for a concentrated sculptural episode rather than a continuous decorative band. The largest forms sit forward, while the sides recede, so the bracelet reads in profile as well as from the front. Its polish catches light across convex silver, then breaks at the recessed lines, where oxidation or shadow gives the curls a graphic edge. The raised dots are small, but they matter: they keep the broad scrolls from becoming too smooth, and they connect the language of metalwork to the touch of the hand that formed it.

The marks place the bracelet within the early postwar history of Los Castillo. The piece is stamped Los Castillo in linear block form, carries eagle assay number 15, and is numbered 250. Hougart records eagle 15 among the numbers used by Los Castillo and illustrates related Los Castillo marks with eagle 15 in the period beginning in 1948, including examples dated 1948 to 1950 and later line marks used from 1950 to 1965 . The museum record dates this bracelet to the late 1940s to early 1950s, a range that fits the eagle mark and the early design number. Morrill and Berk note that Los Castillo used design or inventory numbers and that, for the most part, smaller numbers tend to indicate earlier pieces . That principle should not be made more exact than the evidence allows, but it supports the bracelet’s position within the workshop’s early numbered production.

Los Castillo was established in Taxco in 1939 by Antonio Castillo with members of the Castillo and Terán circle, and the workshop became one of the most inventive and productive enterprises of the Taxco School. Stromberg describes the participation of Antonio, Jorge “Chato” Castillo, Justo “Coco” Castillo, Margot van Voorhies Carr, and Salvador Terán, noting the workshop’s wide range of techniques and styles . This bracelet belongs to a different register from the later Los Castillo works that rely on enamel, stone inlay, feathers, or married metals. Its effect is almost entirely silver against shadow. It shows the workshop thinking through modern ornament by means of hammered relief, enlarged scale, and controlled repetition. Later illustrated in C. Jeanenne Bell’s Old Jewelry, sixth edition, the design has a modest but useful published afterlife. For the Museum, its value lies in how clearly it records an early Los Castillo solution: a bracelet that turns the old silversmith’s problem of raising metal from behind into a compact modern form for the body.