Pre-Columbian Crocodile Brooch

An early brooch abstracting a pre-Columbian crocodile shows the Taxco workshop doing what it did best, taking an ancient Mexican subject and reducing it to a strong modern silhouette. The crocodile belonged to the iconography of Mexico's indigenous past, and Spratling's designers drew on that heritage to give their silver a distinctly Mexican identity rather than a borrowed European one (Stromberg, p. 25).

The word early matters here: this is first-period work, from the years when Spratling's Las Delicias taller, founded in 1931, was establishing the visual language of the silver revival.

The appeal is the abstraction itself, an animal stated in just enough silver to be recognized, which is the signature of the best early Spratling figural design.