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These cuff links carry the Solidaridad Continental, or Continental Solidarity, motif, a design tied to the Pan-American sentiment of Spratling's era and rendered here as a small wearable emblem. The figure makes a political and cultural idea into something to be worn on the cuff.
Spratling drew freely on symbolic and emblematic imagery, and the Solidaridad Continental motif belongs to that strain of his work where a design carried meaning beyond ornament. Worked in silver and scaled to a cuff link, it had to read clearly as an emblem.
As first-period silver cuff links built on a named motif, they sit among the menswear accessories the workshop produced, where a recognizable design did the work in a small format.
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