Jade-Center Scrollwork Brooch with Coral

A dense knot of coral and jade holds the eye before the silver announces itself, and that inversion is the point of this MATL pin. Where much Taxco jewelry leads with the metal and treats stones as accents, here the silver becomes an armature for color, a scrolling framework built to cradle red and green and let them argue. The composition works by controlled abundance: curling wirework, small silver blossoms, and beaded borders press inward toward a central cluster, so the ornament feels grown rather than assembled. This is jewelry designed by a painter, and it shows in the handling of color as the organizing subject.

The pairing of coral and jade carries specific weight in Matilde Poulat's vocabulary. Coral supplies an opaque, saturated red that reads warm against silver, while jade brings a cooler green with its own history in Mexican material culture, prized long before the colonial silver tradition for its association with water, fertility, and preciousness among Mesoamerican peoples. Poulat set these two opacities against the reflectivity of the metal so that light behaves differently across the surface: the stones absorb and hold, the silver throws light back through its scrolls and negative spaces. The result is a deliberately busy, devotional density that recalls colonial ecclesiastical silver and Mexican popular ornament far more than it recalls the austere geometry favored by many of her Taxco contemporaries. Poulat trained as a painter and designer at the San Carlos Academy, and she brought that formation to metal when she opened her shop in 1934, building a folk-inflected style that stood apart from the workshops around her.

Reading the object's likely place in the MATL chronology depends on distinguishing what the marks can and cannot tell us. The script MATL stamps with fineness readings alone, recorded in Hougart's hallmark reference, belong to the earlier decades of the shop, while the registered trademark number 142093 appears on later marked examples, and the designs continued after Poulat's death in 1960 under her nephew Ricardo Salas, who kept the MATL mark alive and eventually added his own registration. A given design in this idiom could therefore have been conceived early and fabricated across a long span, since Salas supervised a substantial workshop producing and assembling MATL pieces well after the founder's lifetime. Without the specific mark on this pin, its exact fabrication date remains open, but the coral and jade combination and the scrolling, cluster-centered construction are consistent with the core MATL language that Poulat established and that the workshop sustained for decades.