Design 5554 Bracelet

Among the figural forms Margot de Taxco committed to enamel-on-silver, the serpent was one she returned to, and design 5554 shows why the subject suited her so well. The coiling reptile united the sinuous Pre-Columbian imagery she admired with the "dramatically modeled, curling forms" she had absorbed from Art Nouveau jewelry and from Taxco's own Sta. Prisca — a convergence Penny C. Morrill identifies as central to her vision (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 168). Few motifs gave her more to work with.

The bracelet is formed as a complete snake, its body realized in articulated sterling links whose surfaces carry a dense enamel field in olive, yellow-green, and blue-green — a palette that reads as living scales under light. The modeled head rises at the clasp end as the dominant sculptural element, set with dark cabochon eyes and an enameled teal collar. A small heart-shaped charm depends from the jaw, a detail that gives playful counterpoint to the animal's imposing scale. The hand of a practiced workshop is legible throughout: Morrill described Margot's enamel idiom as a unity of "elegance of line and sensuality of color" that "combine to produce dramatic effects" (Morrill, p. 166).

Margot established her taller in 1948 and introduced the enamel-on-silver line in 1955 (Morrill, p. 168). The enameling she made her own had roots in her years at Los Castillo, where the technique was first initiated; what she carried out of that workshop she "perfected and developed into one of her major lines of jewelry" (Morrill, p. 166). The numbered design system gave her atelier the consistency of a fashion house, and 5554 — applied to a complex three-dimensional figural form — represents the technique working at a demanding pitch.