Silson Mask Cuff Bracelet

Produced by Victor Silson in silver plate, this cuff is a Spratling design from the early 1940s that also exists in a 980 silver version made in Spratling's own workshop. The two versions track the same design across two very different methods of manufacture.

The bracelet documents Spratling's arrangement with the Silson firm, which produced his designs as silver-plated costume pieces for the United States market while he retained the design credit. These are genuine Spratling designs in plate rather than the hand-wrought silver of Taxco (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 251).

The design vocabulary remains his, rooted in the Pre-Columbian and Colonial sources he reinterpreted throughout his career (Morrill, p. 14). The plate medium changed the material and the price point, not the authorship of the form.

Because it survives alongside a 980 silver counterpart, the Silson cuff is a useful reference object for distinguishing Spratling's licensed costume production from his workshop silver, a recurring question in the collecting of his designs.