Azurite Band Link Bracelet

Overlapping bands of azurite and azur malachite run across this silver link bracelet, the blue and blue-green minerals set in contrast against the metal in one of the colorful stone schemes Spratling developed in the mid-1940s. The piece was part of a body of work created around 1944 and produced from about 1944 to 1946 at his La Florida taller near the northern entrance to Taxco.

Spratling used the contrasting azurite and malachite across a range of pins, necklaces, and this bracelet design, though none of these colorful jewelry designs appeared in his wholesale catalogues of the period. Dated copies of his notes to the silversmiths, instructing them on fabrication and finishing, survive for this body of work, fixing the design firmly within his own hand. It belongs to the First Design Period.

Recorded in the Morrill and Berk survey and in Goddard's field guide, the bracelet is a documented example of the La Florida stone-set jewelry, the surviving fabrication notes giving it an unusually direct tie to Spratling's own direction of the workshop.