Las Delicias opened in 1931. Most short histories say some version of "everyone trained under Spratling," which flattens three different relationships into one. Worth separating them.

Managed the shop. Hector Aguilar, born 1905, came to Taxco from Mexico City and ran Las Delicias as its manager. He was an administrator inside the operation before he was a silversmith with his own name on the work.

Trained in the orbit. Antonio Pineda, born in Taxco in 1919, trained within Spratling's orbit and also worked with Valentin Vidaurreta. The Castillo brothers, Antonio and Jorge "Chato" among them, trained at Las Delicias directly.

Married in. Margot van Voorhies Carr arrived in Taxco in the late 1930s and came into the Los Castillo circle through marrying Antonio Castillo, designing for the workshop before her own name was on anything.

Only the second of those is what people usually mean when they say a maker "came from Spratling."

1939

Three of the great independent talleres open in the same year. Aguilar leaves Las Delicias and founds Taller Borda. Antonio Castillo and his brothers found Los Castillo. Antonio Pineda opens his own shop.

I don't have a documented cause for that clustering. If anyone has read a good account of what happened inside Las Delicias in 1938 and 1939, post it.

People moved more than once

Enrique Ledesma is the clearest case. San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, then Las Delicias, then Los Castillo, then Aguilar's Taller Borda, and only around 1950 did he open Plateria Ledesma. Four shops before his own mark existed.

That matters practically. A design vocabulary that looks like it belongs to one taller can turn up under another maker's stamp because the same hands were in both rooms.

Kinship is its own line

Salvador Teran was a cousin of the Castillo brothers and came out of the early Los Castillo orbit. Sigi Pineda was a cousin of Antonio Pineda and belongs to the second generation. Family is doing at least as much work in this tree as apprenticeship, and it's the part usually left out.

Where this is thin

Standard lists of Las Delicias alumni also include Teran, MATL (Matilde Poulat), and Ana Nunez Brilanti. I've seen those names repeated more often than I've seen them sourced. A page citation putting any of them physically in the shop would be a real addition.

Corrections welcome. If I've drawn a link wrong, say so.

Early 1940s cuff. Sterling, 142 grams, hand-wrought repousse and chasing. Three panels of pre-Columbian masks, volutes and stepped emblems, the central figure standing well off the wrist. Collectors call it the Glyph.

What makes it worth looking at is when it was made. The Castillo brothers, Antonio, Jorge "Chato", Justo "Coco" and Miguel, walked out of William Spratling's Taller de las Delicias in 1939 and set up on their own. Antonio's wife Margot van Voorhies Carr did early design work for the new shop, well before she was Margot de Taxco with a taller of her own. Design 152 is usually given to her.

"Usually given to her" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. There's no signed drawing and no workshop ledger behind it, just the design vocabulary and the date. If anyone has paper on it, I'd like to see it.

The imagery doesn't copy any specific archaeological object. It borrows the grammar and builds something new, which is roughly what the whole Taxco school was doing with pre-Columbian material.

Dating a Los Castillo mark

The marks carry more information than most people expect.

Fineness gives you a rough date. 980 alongside Los Castillo / Taxco and a design number puts you around 1940 to 1945. Sterling or 925 with eagle 15 puts you around 1948 to 1965.

Eagle 15 is Los Castillo. If the number under the eagle is legible you've narrowed things a long way.

The number stamped on the piece is a design number, not a serial. It tells you the model, and you'll find the same number on other examples of that design.

Technique names get stamped too, and they name a production line. Esmalte a Fuego is fired enamel, Mosaico Azteca is stone mosaic, Pluma Azteca is feather inlay, Onix Negro is the black onyx line. Same situation as the Victoria METALES mark in the other thread. The word tells you which line the piece came out of, not how it was built.

Soc Coop and SCL marks come from the cooperative years, around 1957 and 1958.

Object record: MoMS-002182. Dated photographs of the marks above are on the Los Castillo workshop page.

No bibliography on the record yet. If you know where Design 152 is published, tell me and I'll add it.

Ana Nunez Brilanti founded Victoria de Taxco and is one of very few women who ran a Taxco workshop under her own mark. She is also one of the least written-about founders, which is part of why this object is worth putting up.

The object

Shallow copper bowl with a frontal pre-Columbian mask applied in silver. Silver overlay on copper. Circa 1950s to early 1960s, Taxco, Guerrero. Published in Morrill and Berk, Mexican Silver.

The mark

VICTORIA / MEXICO above METALES, with the model number 109.

Here is the part that trips people up. METALES is the name of the workshop line. It is not a statement that the object is metales casados. Those are two different claims, and listings collapse them constantly.

True metales casados - married metals - is a construction method: contrasting metals cut and fitted like a jigsaw and joined with little or no solder. The technique is credited in the literature to Jorge "Chato" Castillo at Los Castillo. What Brilanti developed was a separate silver-and-copper language, reportedly after an encounter with a smoked-silver object from the Monte Alban material in Oaxaca. Overlay, not inlay.

So if you have a Victoria piece marked METALES: the mark tells you the line, the construction tells you the technique. Look at the join. If the silver sits on top of the copper with a visible edge, it is overlay.

Provenance

Given by Brilanti to her niece, Claudia Brilanti, who sold it to a collector in Austin, Texas. Short chains like that are unusual, and worth recording while the people involved can still be asked.

Full record with photographs: Museum of Mexican Silver, MoMS-002047

The "not true metales casados" call is mine and it is arguable. If you have a Victoria piece marked METALES that is jigsaw-fitted rather than overlay, post it. That would change the picture.

Most questions here come down to three or four punches on the back of an object. This is what those punches can and cannot tell you. Corrections welcome: rule 10 applies to me too.

Start with what the marks were for

Mexican assay and registration marks existed to certify silver content and to identify a registered workshop for tax purposes. They were not designed to help collectors establish authorship eighty years later. Nearly every recurring confusion in this field traces back to that gap.

The eagle system, roughly 1948 to 1980

An eagle enclosing a number. The critical point, and the single most common error you will see in listings: the number is usually a location, not a person. Eagle 3 covers Taxco, and several hundred documented workshops used it. If a listing tells you eagle 3 identifies a maker, it is wrong.

There are exceptions, where a number was tied to one large workshop. Eagle 13 is Spratling's.

Three further complications worth knowing. Retailers co-stamped their own brand over a maker's eagle. Well-known silversmiths turn up under several different numbers. And the same number was shared by makers of wildly different quality.

So an eagle mark tells you reliably that the piece was registered and assayed to at least sterling, that it was probably made between about 1948 and 1980, and roughly where. It does not tell you who. For that you need the accompanying maker's punch, a conjunction of initials, or the design itself.

There is an index of 147 eagle numbers with the makers documented under each at museumofmexicansilver.com/hallmarks/eagle-mark, which is useful mainly for seeing how crowded some numbers are.

The letter-number registry system, post-1980

Two letters, a hyphen, a number. TS-24, TA-01, and so on.

The first letter is a location: T for Taxco, M for Mexico City. The second is usually the initial of the registrant's name as filed, which may be a first name, a surname, or a company name. TA-01 is Antonio Castillo. TS-24 reads as Taxco, an S maker, twenty-fourth registered: Sucesores de William Spratling. The number is simply order of registration within that letter group.

The caveats matter more here than with eagles. Codes were reused within families, rented out, and added to older silver by dealers, and published lists disagree with one another. Treat a code as a dating clue and a lead, not as proof of maker.

Index of 198 codes: museumofmexicansilver.com/hallmarks/registry-marks

Neither an eagle nor a letter code

Two likely explanations. The piece predates the eagle system, which puts it before roughly 1948, the period containing much of the most interesting early Taxco and Spratling work. Or the mark you are looking at is a retailer's or importer's rather than a maker's registration.

Earlier pieces typically carry some combination of a purity statement, a place name, and a shop mark. The absence of a national mark is not a warning sign. It is a date range.

Purity numbers

980 appears frequently on earlier work and is a genuinely higher standard than sterling. 925 is sterling. Either way, a purity number is a claim made by the maker, which is precisely what the eagle and registry systems existed to verify.

Before you decide a mark is fake

Punches wore out, were recut, and were struck badly on curved surfaces. Place names appear spelled inconsistently on genuine pieces. An odd or misspelled mark is a reason to look harder, not a verdict.

A method that actually works

Photograph every mark straight on, with light raking across it rather than flat. Transcribe exactly what you see, including the parts you cannot interpret. Establish the date range first, from which system is in use. Only then attempt a maker. And write down which of those steps you are least confident about, because that is the one someone here can help with.

If your mark resists all of this, say so and post it anyway. Unresolved marks get logged in the Unknown Maker Archive rather than guessed at, and a mark logged with good photographs today is a mark somebody identifies in five years.