Silson Serpent Motif Brooch

A serpent-motif brooch in silver plate, this is a Silson piece patented by Victor Silson on December 10, 1940, the patent running three and a half years. It is recorded in Penny Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance.

The serpent belongs to Spratling's Pre-Columbian vocabulary; he described how the pre-Columbian seals became brooches sawed out of heavy sheet silver, a point of departure for the new work (Morrill, p. 39). Under the Silson arrangement, Spratling's patents were registered in the United States in 1940-41 and Silson, Inc. of New York was producing his designs by 1941 (Morrill, p. 257).

The dated patent makes this brooch a precise document of how Spratling's Taxco motifs entered American mass production at the start of the 1940s.