Swirling Repoussé Necklace, Design #366

A single ornamental idea, the spiral scroll raised in high relief from silver sheet, sustains this entire necklace, and the discipline with which it is developed marks the piece as a product of Los Castillo's earliest and most formative years. The design number 366 stamped on the reverse places it low in the workshop's sequence, in the company of the repoussé necklaces numbered 144 and 650 that Penny Morrill dates to about 1940 in Silver Masters of Mexico. Those first years, immediately after Antonio Castillo and his brothers left Spratling's Taller de las Delicias in 1939 to establish their own taller, were the period in which the house's design language was invented, and this necklace preserves that language in an unusually pure state.

The chain is built from paired S-scrolls, each one a hollow form raised by repoussé, its spiral tightening toward a small silver bead at the center. The recesses are darkened so that the polished ridges read as continuous lines of light against shadow, giving a flat linked chain the depth of carved ornament. At the front the same vocabulary expands into a pectoral: scrolls converge from both sides toward a symmetrical center, curl outward like plumes, and resolve below in a pair of facing volutes. The pierced openings within the pectoral do real compositional work, letting skin or fabric show through so that the swirling mass never becomes heavy. The construction is equally telling. Each element is a raised shell backed in flat sheet, so the necklace achieves substantial visual volume at a wearable weight, and the simple hand-formed hook clasp is absorbed into the run of scrolls rather than interrupting it.

The design is probably the work of Margot van Voorhies Carr, later celebrated under her own mark as Margot de Taxco. Margot served as a principal designer at Los Castillo from the workshop's founding, and the fluid, baroque scrollwork seen here, ornament conceived as continuous linear movement rather than as applied motif, is the idiom most closely associated with her hand in the house's early production. The necklace thus documents the collaborative structure of the Taxco taller at its best: a design of real graphic sophistication translated into repoussé by the workshop's smiths and issued under the Los Castillo name, with the mark recording the enterprise rather than any single fabricator.

What this necklace contributes to the history of Los Castillo is a view of the workshop before the innovations for which it later became famous, the married metals and stone inlay techniques that dominated its postwar reputation. Here the house works entirely within silver, and the ambition lies not in material invention but in the control of relief, rhythm, and repetition. Comparable large repoussé necklaces from this moment survive in documented collections, including the pectoral necklace Morrill illustrates from the Crawford collection, and together they establish the swirling scroll as one of the founding statements of the Los Castillo style. This example, with its low design number and fully resolved composition, belongs to that founding group, made at the moment when a new workshop was proving that it could stand apart from the taller that trained it.