"pillow" Bracelet with Silver Diagonal Band on Each Link

A diagonal band laid across each link turns a chain of soft, pillow-form units into something with a steady visual rhythm, the kind of disciplined geometry that ran through the early Taxco workshop. The bracelet belongs to the first design period of the Taller de las Delicias, the workshop Spratling founded in 1931 and that Morrill credits with fusing twentieth-century production with a design culture far older than the Spanish arrival (Morrill, p. 14).

The same model was also made with a bronze band rather than silver, a substitution that shows how the workshop treated a strong form as a template to be reworked in different materials. The pillow links keep their volume while the banding flattens and orders the surface, so the piece reads as both substantial and graphic.

First-period silver from Las Delicias is the foundation of the Taxco revival, and link bracelets of this directness come to market only occasionally. A piece that carries the workshop's early vocabulary in its construction is collected as much for what it documents as for what it is.