Bird Drop Brooch with Turquoise and Hardstone

A silver pin set with turquoise and hardstone, 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 the painting she had studied at the San Carlos Academy for silver (Morrill, p. 216).

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

Pins of this kind appear in our dataset with some regularity, in keeping with the recognizable, stone-set character of MATL jewelry.