Silver and Malachite Parrot Pitcher

A pitcher at this weight — more than fifty-seven troy ounces of sterling silver including the handle, with malachite inlaid into the body and a parrot as the governing motif — extends Los Castillo's stone-inlay vocabulary into domestic hollowware, a form the workshop visited less often than jewelry. At nine and a quarter inches it is a piece made to be seen.

The parrot draws on the naturalistic Mexican imagery the Castillo workshop returned to across table objects and jewelry alike. Malachite's layered banded green gives the bird material presence and textural depth against the silver ground, consistent with the workshop's documented practice of combining silver with inlaid natural stones — onyx and crushed stone among them, as Morrill records in Mexican Silver. Hallmarks confirm Taxco production.

A signed and hallmarked sterling pitcher with inlaid stone is a less-expected form of the workshop's practice.