Aztec Butterfly Bell

This bell stands among the more fully documented designs to come out of William Spratling's workshop, the enterprise whose founding in the 1930s set the Taxco silver revival in motion. A Third Design Period work from the years between 1951 and 1967, it is recorded in the principal Spratling literature, including Sandraline Cederwall and Hal Riney's Spratling Silver and its Centennial Edition, Penny C. Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance: Maestros de Plata, Phyllis M. Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide, and Spratling Silver in Taxco.

The design carries three small bells together with three Aztec butterflies, a motif that ties the piece to Spratling's lifelong practice of drawing on pre-Columbian Mexican sources. The form was a catalogued production model: its wholesale price in the 1961 Spratling catalogue was $48, rising to $52 by the 1967 catalogue.

The bell reached a wide audience in its day. It was included in the traveling museum exhibition The World of William Spratling, which toured the United States in 1965, and the design is held in the collection of the Birmingham Art Museum.

That the design was later reissued speaks to its enduring appeal. Between the catalogue record, the exhibition history, and the museum holding, this is a design whose place in Spratling's body of work is unusually well established.