Design 5280 necklace

The design number 5280 places this sterling and enamel necklace late in the numbered inventory that Margot de Taxco maintained across her studio's full working life. Morrill's *Mexican Silver* (1994) observes that lower numbers designate earlier works, which positions this design toward the latter decades of a career that stretched from the late 1940s through the 1980s — a period when Margot's formal vocabulary was fully settled and her enamel line well established.

That vocabulary had been built from an unusual breadth of sources. As Morrill documents, Margot drew on Japanese graphic art absorbed during two trips to Japan in the late 1950s, on Pre-Columbian ornamental pattern including motifs sketched firsthand at Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and La Venta, on the curvilinear ornament of Parisian Art Nouveau, and on the Baroque surface of Taxco's own Santa Prisca. Enamel-on-silver was the medium that distilled these influences most directly, combining what Morrill describes as "elegance of line and sensuality of color."