parrot stone inlay goblet

The goblet is a rare form in the Taxco silver tradition, and this example extends Los Castillo's inlay work into an unusual vehicle. Rather than jewelry worn by a single person, a sterling goblet with figural stone inlay is a table object meant to perform the workshop's polychrome ambitions in front of an audience — a drinking vessel that asks more of the technique than a bracelet does.

The parrot belonged to the Castillo figural vocabulary well before mid-century: Morrill and Berk catalogue parrot imagery among the workshop's documented designs from the early 1940s onward. On this goblet the bird's plumage is rendered through colored stone set into sterling, the same inlay approach the workshop deployed in tortoise shell, crushed stone, and onyx across other forms (Morrill & Berk, Mexican Silver, 1994; Morrill, 1996). The design intelligence behind a tropical bird motif of this kind drew on Mixtec and Aztec codices, an ethic that shaped the workshop's principal designers across generations of the family (Morrill, 1996, p. 174).

This goblet marks the productive range the Castillo family brought to their craft: the technical command of a jewelry atelier extended, without compromise, into the territory of the set table.