Rectangular Amethyst Ring with Turquoise Accents

This ring compresses the MATL aesthetic into its smallest wearable form, and in doing so it foregrounds the stone-setting craft that distinguished the workshop. Matilde Poulat trained as a painter at the San Carlos Academy before devoting herself to silver, and her jewelry, as Morrill records, was part of the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic that turned away from European subjects toward Pre-Conquest and pueblo sources (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 216). A ring leaves little room for the fringes and figural flourishes of the larger MATL pieces, so the design here relies on the essentials of the idiom: a strong central stone, channel-set color, and a silver frame worked with beadwork and twisted wire.

The composition is a rectangular bezel dominated by a faceted amethyst of deep purple, set upright at the center. Flanking it on either side, and marking the corners, are rectangular fields of turquoise set as segmented channel inlay—small blocks of stone fitted into silver-walled channels, a technique that lets a modest quantity of turquoise read as a continuous ribbon of blue. Silver beads punctuate the four corners, and the shoulders resolve into a twisted-wire shank. The engineering is careful: the raised amethyst gives the ring height and a jewel-like focus, while the surrounding turquoise and beadwork build a framing rhythm around it. The result is architectural at a small scale, dense but balanced, and substantial on the hand without being ungainly.

That inlay is the point of connection to the workshop's documented craft. Ricardo Salas, Poulat's nephew and lifelong collaborator, was trained to carve and set turquoise, coral, and other stones for the firm, and Morrill notes the two worked so closely that their designs cannot readily be separated (Morrill, 1994, p. 216). The channel-set turquoise here, fitted piece by piece into its silver cells, is exactly the kind of patient stonework that skill produced. The pairing of turquoise with a faceted amethyst also reflects the bright, color-forward palette the shop favored, rooted in the Mexican and Pre-Columbian sensibility Morrill places at the origin of Poulat's work.

Because the MATL workshop produced a very large catalogue of designs—Salas recalled roughly three thousand types of silver jewelry (Morrill, 1994, p. 216)—a stone-set ring of this kind represents a design type rather than a unique piece, and specific production or survival figures are not documented. Rings also survive less readily than brooches, having been worn harder, so an example with its amethyst secure and its turquoise inlay complete preserves the intended design more fully than many. That completeness, together with the clear display of the workshop's stone-setting technique, is what gives such a ring its interest.