Vintage Royston Turquoise and Silver Graduated Necklace Santo Domingo Necklace

Our Royston Turquoise and Silver Graduated Necklace Santo Domingo is a striking celebration of one of the most difficult forms of Royston turquoise to find: substantial natural rough with the size, color, and character required to create a necklace of this caliber. Large pieces of beautiful Royston are increasingly scarce, and the artist has drawn from her own carefully preserved reserve to assemble this exceptional progression of stones. Each one is wonderfully individual, moving through shades of aqua, sage, blue-green, olive, honey, and warm brown matrix before arriving at the magnificent central turquoise. The stones are the heart of this piece—and once this private cache has been transformed into jewelry, another necklace with this exact material, scale, and painterly beauty cannot be recreated. Jean Marie was immediately captivated by it: it feels collected over time, deeply personal, and entirely one of a kind.

Royston turquoise comes from the historic Royston mining district near Tonopah, Nevada, celebrated for an extraordinary range of blue and green color often intertwined with golden-brown and earthy matrix. While turquoise is still associated with active mining in parts of the district, exceptional older material—particularly substantial stones with distinctive color and matrix—is increasingly difficult to encounter. A group of vintage stones large enough, harmonious enough, and varied enough to create a graduated necklace such as this is especially unusual. Their differences are precisely what make the piece so compelling: every stone possesses its own miniature landscape.

The artisan has carefully shaped, drilled, smoothed, and polished the turquoise while allowing its natural contours and matrix to remain part of the design. Small polished silver beads provide luminous punctuation between the stones, while the generous central specimen anchors the necklace with remarkable visual weight. Rather than forcing the turquoise into rigid uniformity, the artist has balanced color, proportion, and shape by eye—a sensibility refined through generations of Kewa jewelry making. The subtle irregularities are not imperfections; they are evidence of the human hand.

Jean Marie is particularly drawn to jewelry with this kind of provenance. Her lifelong appreciation of Native American craftsmanship began during childhood visits to the Pueblos with her mother, Philomena, and today she makes a point of patronizing the artisans whose work continues to fascinate her. Discovering that these vintage Royston stones came from the artist’s own private reserve made the necklace even more meaningful. Worn simply against white cotton, silk, or a flowing Pax Philomena kaftan, it becomes the entire statement—a one-of-a-kind piece of wearable sculpture, rich with history, individuality, and the beauty of material saved until the right moment.

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Made in New Mexico, USA

Length 18.5"