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Worn at the shoulder or lapel, this turquoise-and-amethyst pin distills the Matl manner into a single ornament: worked silver carrying inlaid semiprecious stone. The approach traces to Matilde Poulat, who trained as a painter at the San Carlos Academy before turning entirely to silver, and whose designs formed part of the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic drawn from Pre-Conquest and pueblo art (Morrill, p. 216).
The pin's turquoise and amethyst sit in settings of the kind the workshop made its own. Ricardo Salas, who worked alongside his aunt from the age of eleven, perfected the carving of coral, turquoise, and other stones used across the taller's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).
The form recurs in our dataset more than the rarer one-off pieces, a reflection of how readily the brooch suited the Matl idiom. It remains a characteristic, recognizable example of the workshop's stone-set silver.
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