Design 5223 bracelet

A numbered design from Margot de Taxco's enamel-on-sterling catalog, this bracelet carries the model designation 5223 — one entry in a systematic program that organized the taller's output across roughly four decades, from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. Pieces with their design numbers intact offer a direct reference point within that lineage, locating an object in a coherent creative sequence rather than leaving it as an anonymous period piece.

Morrill documents that Reveriano Castillo and Miguel Melendez initiated the champlevé technique at Los Castillo, which Margot subsequently "perfected and developed into one of her major lines of jewelry" (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 166). The enamel bracelet belongs to that tradition — vitreous color sustained over sterling, a discipline demanding equal command of the silversmith's and the enameler's crafts. Morrill further notes that Margot drew on Japanese art and on Pre-Columbian ornament she found compatible with Art Deco energetics, an eclecticism that gave her enamel designs a range unusually broad for a single workshop.