Fish Mother of Pearl Tray

Fish appear throughout Los Castillo's documented silver output — recorded in necklaces, cuffs, and jewelry suites from the early 1940s through the late 1950s by Penny C. Morrill — and this sterling tray carries the motif into hollowware, rendered in inlaid mother-of-pearl against a silver ground. The movement from wearable silver to a serving object without changing the iconographic language is characteristic of how the Castillo family workshop understood its design vocabulary as transferable across forms and scales.

Shell inlay requires each nacre element to be cut and set flush within a recessed field in the silver, so that the iridescence of the material and the sheen of the metal read together rather than in contrast. Los Castillo's inlay practice spans tortoise, crushed stone, onyx, and glass — documented by Penny C. Morrill across examples from the workshop — and mother-of-pearl fits naturally into that range.