Swirled and Twisted Three Dimensional Necklace

The frontal bib of this necklace is built entirely from swirled and twisted silver wire, its loops and arcs interlocked to rise away from the body in an open, three-dimensional lattice. Small silver balls accent the wire terminals and hang as drops along the lower edge; a chain of hollow silver balls carries the whole at the neck, holding the vocabulary of line and sphere consistent throughout.

What distinguishes the piece historically is how it entered the record: the design appears in William Spratling's private workshop notes from August 1945 but not in any subsequent wholesale catalogue. The catalog number was assigned from those notes rather than from a published trade list, and the design was not carried forward into commercial production.

The open wire-bib format places this necklace at an experimental edge of Spratling's First Design Period, roughly 1931 to 1946, a moment when, as Stromberg has documented, Taxco's workshops made innovation and experimentation central to their practice. The calligraphic quality of the wirework — loops, swells, and arabesques in place of cast or sheet silver — suggests a direction Spratling held back from mass production, one reserved for the atelier's own investigation.