From the Research Desk
Field notes, guides, and dispatches — in roughly the order they were written.
Dispatch · May 4, 2026
Alexander Calder's jewelry was received as art the moment he made it, because he was already known as a sculptor. The Taxco school had no such advocate, and a half-century of mid-century Mexican silver has been miscategorized as vintage jewelry rather than what it is: modern sculpture.
Dispatch · April 27, 2026
Spratling is the most famous name in twentieth-century Mexican silver. Las Delicias was, in its peak years, the largest silver workshop in Mexico. None of that means his pieces are easy to find today. Across the 2,094 named-Spratling lots that have crossed a published auction since 2007, the median clears at $750, the top decile at $2,600, and only fourteen have ever cleared $10,000. Production was numerous. Survival is not.
Dispatch · April 27, 2026
Taxco silver has beauty, history, scarcity, and market inefficiency in the same place. The auction record across 1,156 weighable Golden Age lots, with each lot's melt value computed at the silver spot in effect on the day it sold, shows the spread: a typical Spratling or Pineda piece clears at roughly ten times its silver weight, the best examples clear sixty to a hundred times, and the same makers' hollowware regularly sells below melt at the wrong auction. The drift between the metal floor and the recognition ceiling is the entire opportunity.
Guide · April 21, 2026
A 5xxx number on a Margot piece identifies a design, not a specific item. Here's what the stamp actually tells you, and what to watch for when it doesn't.
Guide · April 21, 2026
A Golden Age hallmark tells you who made the piece, where, what the silver content is, and — after 1948 — which workshop was registered to the Mexican government. Here's how to read each part.
Dispatch · April 21, 2026
One couple's Taxco Golden Age jewelry — 119 lots across every major workshop of the era — cleared through two Bonhams sales in 2022 and 2023. The results are a cleaner benchmark for the middle of the market than collectors remember.
Discovery · April 21, 2026
A rare variant of Hector Aguilar's iconic Georgia O'Keeffe-style concho belt carries a 990 stamp where every other surviving example reads 940. What the 990 actually means is an open question — but the auction record already recognizes it as something different.
