Rosewood and Silver Tube Necklace

Strung from silver tube links and rosewood, this necklace turns two unlike materials into a single rhythm, the cool metal alternating with the warm, dense grain of the wood.

By the Third Design Period of 1951 to 1967, Spratling was using exotic woods extensively as a counterweight to silver. Morrill describes silver dots on wood as a motif he worked repeatedly in these years, lending his pieces "a sense of playfulness and sophistication" (Morrill, p. 73). The tube-and-wood necklace belongs to that same vocabulary of contrast.

It was made in three lengths, a sign of a design popular enough to offer in variants. The necklace is recorded in three of the standard references: Spratling Silver by Cederwall and Riney, Davis and Pack's Mexican Jewelry, and Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide.