Three Obsidian Stone Ring

Obsidian set into silver is one of the signatures of the Taxco revival, and this ring shows the idea worked down to intimate scale: three small obsidian stones laid horizontally across the center, flanked by faceted triangular planes of silver that catch and break the light.

The pairing is deliberate. From the first years of his Las Delicias workshop, Spratling built designs around native Mexican materials, and the volcanic glass of obsidian, dark and reflective, gave silver a foil that purely metallic jewelry could not. Here the faceting on the silver shoulders does the same work in reverse, throwing planes of brightness against the matte stone.

Spratling described his early design sources as a "point of departure" drawn from pre-Columbian and colonial Mexico (Morrill, p. 39), and the discipline shows even in a small ring like this one: the form is reduced to a few clean geometric elements rather than ornamented for its own sake.

The ring is recorded in Mary L. Davis and Greta Pack's Mexican Jewelry. Spratling rings with stone settings of this kind come to market only occasionally.