Frog Link Bracelet

This frog link bracelet was made in the early 1940s by Victor Silson in silver-plated pot metal, from a Spratling design that Spratling provided to Silson in return for royalties. The arrangement is unusually well documented here, naming both the maker and the commercial terms.

The piece is a clear instance of Spratling's licensing of his designs to outside manufacturers. He supplied the design and took royalties; Silson handled the production in plated pot metal for the United States costume market. These are authentic Spratling designs, but distinct from the hand-wrought silver of his own workshop (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 251).

The frog itself is drawn from the Pre-Columbian animal vocabulary Spratling revived in metal (Morrill, p. 14), here repeated as a link motif.

The explicit royalty arrangement makes this bracelet a useful documentary example of how Spratling extended his design reach into the United States mass market without abandoning the workshop, and it sits firmly within the recognized Silson sub-category of his output.