Bracelet of "Tubes" with Applied Circles

Built from silver "tubes" laid in a band and accented with applied circles, this bracelet translates plain geometric volumes into ornament, the cylinders giving body and the discs giving rhythm across the wrist. It dates to the Third Design Period of 1951 to 1967 and has been reissued in later production.

The applied circle and disc was a recurring device in Spratling's later work, a motif that lent his objects of this period a quality Morrill describes as both playful and sophisticated (Morrill, p. 73). Here it is deployed in a strictly abstract, architectural composition.

Recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver volume and its centennial edition, and reissued under the hand-wrought program that has carried Spratling designs forward with little change in technique (Morrill, p. 251), the bracelet is a clean example of the workshop's late geometric vocabulary.