floral necklace

Floral necklaces in sterling occupy a naturalistic corner of the Los Castillo output that stands alongside the pre-Columbian codex forms and married-metals work that defined the workshop's signature vocabulary. When the Castillo brothers departed William Spratling's Las Delicias taller in 1939 to establish their own studio, they carried with them a practiced command of repoussé technique and a design sensibility that could move between indigenous and botanical registers. Morrill records that Chato Castillo's early repoussé was shaped by his time at Taller Matl, working alongside Matilde Poulat — an apprenticeship in the baroque silver forms that underpinned the Taxco revival's first generation.

Morrill's 1996 catalog documents multiple Los Castillo necklaces in sterling from around 1940, including repoussé pectorals and leaf-form work, evidence of a workshop that moved readily between figurative and organic motifs without fixing on a single idiom. Botanical forms in silver have a long genealogy in Mexican jewelry, and the Castillo workshop was well positioned to work that current alongside its more celebrated codex-derived production. Hand-wrought quality remained central to the family's ethos throughout; Morrill notes that the Castillos declined to expand production beyond what the workshop could execute by hand.

Sterling floral necklaces represent a less-examined facet of a multigenerational Taxco family's long and varied practice.