parrot silverplate turquoise pitcher

Turquoise and tiger's-eye worked into a parrot-form pitcher place this piece squarely in the decorative output that distinguished Los Castillo from its jewelry-first contemporaries. Vessels at this scale were made in the orfebreria, the workshop arm given to pitchers and services (Morrill), and the parrot follows the animal subjects the Castillos drew from the natural world (Morrill, p. 92).

Here the colored stone does the chromatic work against the silverplate body, turquoise carrying the cooler notes and tiger's-eye the warmer. Founded by Antonio Castillo in Taxco in 1939, Los Castillo held that it should never be merely commercial or repeat itself, improving on detail instead (Morrill, p. 91).

This particular combination is seldom seen, and the piece reads as a small study in how the workshop let stone and metal share a single figural form.