Ebony and Gold Bracelet

This cuff turns Spratling's silver-on-wood vocabulary inward, working a band of ebony as the body of the bracelet and insetting it with gold beads, diamonds, and squares. Eleven gold beads run in a groove along the top edge and eleven more along the bottom, framing the dark wood with two parallel lines of precious metal.

The approach belongs to the wooden cuffs Spratling developed in his later years. Morrill records exactly this form, the "wooden cuff bracelet" of the period, and identifies the inset dots and circles as the motif that gave such pieces "a sense of playfulness and sophistication" (Morrill, p. 73). Here the dots are gold and the ground is ebony.

The inset geometry, beads alternating with diamonds and squares, organizes the dark surface into rhythm, the gold catching light against the matte wood. It is jewelry built from the same idea as his dotted boxes and ashtrays.

The bracelet is recorded in Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance: Maestros de Plata, placing it firmly within the documented wooden-cuff group of his mature work.