Design 5676 necklace

Among the higher design numbers in Margot van Voorhies Carr's sequential catalog, this enamel necklace belongs to the mature years of a working life that ran more than three decades through the Taxco silver revival. Morrill documents that the smaller the design number, the earlier the piece — placing a model numbered in the five-thousands in the later, fully fluent period of her taller rather than its experimental beginnings.

The necklace belongs to the enamel-on-sterling line that became the defining medium of Margot's workshop. As Morrill records, she took a technique first explored by other hands at Los Castillo and developed it into one of her major jewelry lines, producing necklaces whose elegance of line and sensuality of color she sustained across decades of numbered models. Her influences ran from Japanese art — she made two trips to Japan in the late 1950s — to Pre-Columbian pattern and the curling ornament of Parisian Art Nouveau, all filtered through the rigorous design-number system that made each model traceable to its source.

The number itself, present on the reverse in the manner Morrill documents across her output, grounds the piece directly in her catalog and makes it legible to collectors working through her documented designs.