Chachalaca Brooch

A chachalaca, the native turkey, rendered in miniature with three cascabels hanging from its claw, this very small brooch is an early figural design that distills a Mexican bird into compact silver. It is recorded in Phyllis M. Goddard's Spratling Silver field guide and dates to the first design period.

The chachalaca and the dangling cascabels belong to Spratling's vocabulary of Mexican fauna and the small jingling bells he used as a recurring motif. Abstracting a local bird into a wearable form is exactly the kind of translation of native subject matter that defined his early jewelry, rendered legibly for a broad audience as Stromberg describes (Stromberg, p. 27).

Early figural pins of this scale come to market only occasionally and are collected as examples of the workshop's first-period animal designs.