Ying Yang Hands Necklace

Two open hands, one in polished sterling and one built from chip-inlaid azur malachite, meet at the center of this pendant where a yin-yang symbol is cut through the silver palm — the gap in the metal revealing the blue-green stone beneath and completing the ancient duality emblem in two materials at once. The concept is spare but precise: by casting the two hands in opposing substances, the design makes the yin-yang argument through material contrast rather than surface ornament. William Spratling had been at the center of the Taxco silver revival since the 1930s, and the intellectual ambition of a piece like this — an Eastern emblem rendered in stone and metal whose very difference enacts its meaning — reflects the range his practice achieved in its final period.

The stone is azur malachite, the combined copper mineral that carries both the vivid blue of azurite and the banded green of malachite in a single shifting surface. Spratling's catalogs adjusted their nomenclature over the years, naming the material first as azurite and later as malachite, though the stone throughout production appears to be the same combined mineral. Each hand is cut at generous scale — pendant dimensions running close to five inches across — and the piece rides on an elongated flat bar-link chain whose clean geometry keeps attention anchored at the pendant rather than the neck.

The design appeared across Spratling's catalogs from the late 1950s through 1967 and was also realized in tortoise shell and adapted into a belt buckle, suggesting it held a sustained place in the workshop's production. The piece has been reissued, making period marks — the WS script hallmark alongside an Eagle assay stamp on later examples, the maker's logotype with 925 on earlier ones — the primary means of placing a given example within original production.