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A spiraling sea shell set with an amethyst forms each of these earrings, marrying one of Spratling's favored marine subjects to the violet Mexican stone: the coiled shell supplies the form, the cabochon the color. The naturalistic spiral and the semiprecious stone together place the pair squarely in the workshop's nature-and-stone vocabulary.
The design was made in several variants. Per the existing record it appeared with amethyst as here, with obsidian, and in plain silver, and the same shell-and-amethyst element was used to adorn a rosewood box, showing how the workshop carried a single motif between jewelry and objects. The design does not appear in any Spratling catalog after 1958, fixing its production to the earlier years.
The earrings are recorded in Phyllis M. Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. Shell earrings set with amethyst survive in small numbers and are collected as examples of the workshop's marine designs.
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