Square Button

A square silver button, larger of the two sizes in which it was made, this small fastener belongs to the workshop production that ran alongside Spratling's jewelry and hollowware. The square is the plainest of geometric formats, and at button scale it becomes a clean, modern unit of silver.

The design was versatile within the workshop's output, made also as earrings and adapted to a variety of other items. That reuse of a single simple form across object types is characteristic of how Spratling's workshop worked, getting maximum range from a well-resolved shape.

First-period buttons of this kind are modest objects, and the larger size is the more substantial of the pair. They come to market only occasionally as discrete pieces rather than as sets.