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These hands cufflinks are cut from azur malachite, the blue-green stone giving the figural form a cool, mottled color quite unlike its silver-backed tortoise shell counterpart. The hand was a motif Spratling returned to, realized here entirely in the worked stone.
The use of azur malachite reflects the workshop's habit of cutting figural forms from natural materials, the same range of stones, including malachite, that Spratling would later draw on for the Alaska commission (Morrill, p. 66).
Because the hands design exists in more than one material, a malachite pair like this is best understood as one expression of a small family of cufflinks, prized for the depth of color the stone brings.
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