In 1939, the Castillo brothers—Antonio, Jorge, Justo, and Miguel—left William Spratling’s Taller de Las Delicias (established in 1935) to open their own workshop, motivated by the resurgence of the silver industry in Mexico. Antonio’s wife, Margot van Voorhies Carr, was the workshop’s lead designer, and many of Los Castillo’s designs evidence her lifelong admiration for Asian art. For this bracelet, she drew from motifs inspired by Japanese ceramics and textiles that she would have known from her childhood in San Francisco. The incised lines of the curling waves contrast with the delicately rendered scales of the intertwined fish, which appear to leap through the waves in continuous motion.
Antonio and Margot divorced in 1946, at which point she left Los Castillo to start her own workshop, which she called Margot de Taxco. There she continued to create Asian-inspired works. In a similar bracelet from this later period, Margot introduced champlevé enameling to heighten the contrast between the fish and waves through color (M.2013.6.4).
Rachel Kaplan
2025
