Turquoise Flower Necklace

Three carved turquoise flowers alternating with four silver sun rays make this necklace a small anthology of Spratling's early design instincts: native stone carved rather than merely set, and a celestial motif rendered in flat worked silver. The turquoise carries the color, the silver the geometry.

Carved hardstone and Mexican motif were central to Spratling's First Design Period (1931-1946), when he was translating Pre-Columbian and Colonial sources into a modern idiom and working with materials native to Mexico (Morrill, p. 39). The sun-ray form belongs to that vocabulary of abstracted natural and celestial shapes.

The necklace is recorded in Penny Morrill's Maestros de Plata, the principal reference for his jewelry.