Floral Fringe Necklace with Turquoise

Flowers worked in silver and set with turquoise carry this necklace, drawing on one of the motifs at the heart of MATL design. Flowers, with the dove and tiny bells, were among Matilde Poulat's signature subjects, recalling the whimsical imagery of contemporary Mexican folk art (Morrill, p. 216).

The necklace pairs that folk vocabulary with the inlaid turquoise the taller was known for. Poulat trained as a painter at the San Carlos Academy before silver became her medium, and her figural designs grew from the post-Revolution turn toward Mexican sources (Morrill, p. 216).

The turquoise reflects the hand-carved stones Ricardo Salas prepared for the firm's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).

Floral necklaces of this kind appear in our dataset only occasionally, and they show one of the motifs most central to MATL design at fuller scale.