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A crescent, or croissant, curve gives this buckle its whole identity, the swelling silver form set off by gold wash worked into its interior areas so that the recesses glow against the bright metal. It is a Third Design Period piece, from the 1951 to 1967 years when Spratling, working out of his ranch at Taxco-el-Viejo, pared objects down to clean sculptural outlines.
Morrill describes exactly this late tendency, objects "pared down to their simplest outline" with an emphasis on richness and textural contrast (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 73). The contrast here is chromatic rather than material, silver against gold-washed silver, but the instinct is the same.
Spratling's own drawing of this design survives in the William Spratling Folio of Drawings, and the piece is recorded in Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance: Maestros de Plata and in Phyllis M. Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. That a working drawing exists makes the buckle traceable directly to his hand.
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