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A Spratling-designed pin executed in silver-plated pot metal by Victor Silson, this piece belongs to the licensed costume production rather than to Spratling's own workshop. The design is his; the material and the manufacture are Silson's.
In the early 1940s Spratling licensed designs to the Silson firm, which produced them as silver-plated costume jewelry for the United States market. These pieces are genuine Spratling designs in a non-precious medium, distinct from the hand-wrought silver of Taxco (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 251). Pot metal under silver plate was the standard Silson construction.
The design itself comes from Spratling's vocabulary, rooted in the Pre-Columbian and Colonial sources he worked from throughout his career (Morrill, p. 14).
For collectors the Silson pieces are a defined niche: authentic Spratling designs, mass-produced in plate, worth identifying precisely because they differ so sharply in material and value from his workshop silver.
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