Crown Brooch with Turquoise and Coral

A silver pin set with turquoise and coral, this piece distills the MATL manner into a single ornament of worked metal carrying inlaid color. The pairing grew from Matilde Poulat's post-Revolution turn toward a Mexican aesthetic drawn from Pre-Conquest and pueblo art, after she left painting, which she had studied at the San Carlos Academy, for silver (Morrill, p. 216).

The turquoise and coral reflect the taller's hand craft, where Ricardo Salas was trained from boyhood to carve and set coral, turquoise, and other stones for the firm's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).

Pins of this kind appear in our dataset only occasionally, in keeping with the varied, individually made character of MATL production.