Design 5524 necklace

The high design number on this sterling silver necklace locates it in the developed, confident phase of Margot van Voorhies Carr's work under the Margot de Taxco mark. Morrill's documentation of her numbered inventory system notes that smaller numbers indicate earlier pieces, which places a design this high well into a career built on technical mastery earned over decades. That mastery centered on champlevé enamel-on-silver: a technique that, as Morrill records, Margot perfected and expanded into one of her major jewelry lines after collaborative experiments at the Los Castillo workshop in the 1940s, before she established her own taller.

Necklaces occupied a central position in that enamel line. Morrill writes that her champlevé necklaces remain "glittering displays of color, texture, and technical perfection," with elegance of line and sensuality of color combining to produce dramatic effects — a quality standard she maintained across the full arc of her design sequence. Sigi Pineda, who came to oversee enameling in the workshop from 1950, helped sustain that technical consistency through her later decades of production.