Owl Brooch with Amethyst Eyes

Among the animal forms Spratling was fashioning in silver at the Taller Las Delicias — Penny C. Morrill groups owls alongside parrots and jaguars as defining motifs of the period — few proved as enduring as the owl brooch. Its appearance in the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog of 1943 at $14.95 marks a telling moment in the Taxco revival's reach: hand-wrought Mexican silver moving through one of America's largest mail-order channels, carrying the workshop's aesthetic to a broad wartime audience.

The design is organized around the owl's confrontational frontality. Two large hemispherical amethyst cabochons fill oversized eye sockets ringed with closely chased radiating lines, giving the face its immediate visual weight. The breast is textured with a punched dot field evoking spotted plumage, while the folded wing and drooping tail are rendered in parallel incised lines — work executed through cincelar, the controlled hammer-and-chisel marking technique that Morrill and Berk document as part of the Taxco silversmithing tradition. Small triangular ear tufts keep the silhouette spare and resolved.

Morrill and Berk's account of Spratling's early design method — pre-Columbian seals sawed from heavy sheet silver, forms drawn from indigenous clay stamps — places the owl within a lineage of simplified, totemic animal subjects that defined the First Design Period. The high-grade sterling and substantial weight, approximately 34 to 40 grams across documented examples, reflect the material standards of the Taller Las Delicias at its wartime height.

Because the design was later reissued, and because Silson produced a broadly comparable owl brooch for the American mass market, period examples call for close attention to the verso. Intact double hallmarks — "Spratling Made in Mexico" and "Spratling Silver" — provide the key attribution markers for distinguishing workshop production from subsequent iterations.