Small Scalloped Buckle

A scalloped edge and a single incised scalloped line are all that ornament this primitive buckle, an early piece in which Spratling lets a contour and one cut do the entire work. The buckle was a foundational form for the taller after its 1931 founding, the heavy belt fitting among the first objects it produced (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 156).

The restraint here is the point. Spratling's earliest designs drew on Aztec and Colonial motives as a starting point (Morrill, p. 156), and a scalloped silver edge reads as that vocabulary stripped to its barest gesture.

This design was made in two sizes; this is the smaller. It is recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver volumes. Early buckles of this type surface only occasionally.