Looped Hinged Bracelet with Tiger Eye

The bracelet is organized around a compact exchange between enclosure and openness: a polished silver band holds the wrist in a clean oval, while the front breaks into layered loops that circle, frame, and partly release a tiger eye cabochon. The stone is large enough to anchor the composition, yet it is not treated as a conventional centerpiece set into a passive mount. Its oval form becomes one curve among several. Silver arcs pass around it, overlap it, and return toward the band, creating a shallow relief that gives the bracelet a frontal architecture without sacrificing the continuous contour needed for wear.

The construction is central to the effect. Double hinges at the sides allow the bracelet to open while preserving the visual firmness of a cuff, and the invisible V closure keeps the fastening system from interrupting the design. At seven inches around and one and one-eighth inches high at the front, the bracelet has presence without excessive breadth. The front is built from broad and narrow passages of silver, so that mass and line alternate across the wrist. The tiger eye adds a different kind of movement. Its brown and gold bands shift under light, answering the reflective silver with a deeper, fibrous glow. Sigi Pineda’s design depends on that contrast: the metal supplies the hard modern outline, while the stone introduces an optical warmth that changes as the bracelet turns.

The marks recorded on the piece identify it with Sigi Pineda’s mid-century production: the old Sigi marks, Eagle 36, and design number 290. Hougart documents Eagle 36 among Sigi Pineda’s marks and notes that some of his work carries inventory or design numbers. Morrill and Berk also describe design numbers as part of the inventory systems used by several Taxco workshops, including Sigi’s, with lower numbers generally tending earlier, though not as exact dates. The 1950s dating accords with the bracelet’s formal language and with Sigi’s emergence as an independent designer after his years in Margot van Voorhies’s workshop. Morrill and Berk record that he oversaw Margot’s enamelers for four years before opening his own shop in the mid-1950s, a background that helps explain the bracelet’s control of surface, color, and assembly even though this piece is organized around stone rather than enamel.

Within the Taxco School, the bracelet belongs to a current of Mexican modernist jewelry that treated the body as a site for constructed form. Its loops are not decorative scrolls in the older sense. They function as spatial units, turning the face of the bracelet into a small composition of arcs, voids, and changing reflections. The design also avoids the flatness of many stone-set cuffs by giving the setting depth and lateral motion. In that sense it is characteristic of Sigi Pineda’s strongest work of the period: fluent, asymmetrical, materially alert, and conscious of international modern design without losing the handmade intelligence of the Taxco taller. The bracelet is a useful object for the Museum not simply because it is signed and numbered, but because it preserves a specific solution to a central problem of modern Mexican silver: how to make ornament, hinge, setting, and bodily movement operate as one design.