Hand Earrings with Azurite Mosaic

A pair of hands worked in azurite mosaic, this earring sets the deep blue stone into a figural form, the hand being one of the recurring motifs across Spratling's jewelry. The same style was also made in tortoiseshell, the workshop's habit of offering one design in contrasting materials.

The mosaic technique, fitting cut stone into a silver framework, belongs to the textural, material-driven approach Morrill identifies in Spratling's work, where the contrast and richness of materials carried the design (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 73). Azurite gives the hands their saturated blue.

The earrings are recorded in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver: 20th Century Handwrought Jewelry & Metalwork. Stone-mosaic pieces of this kind surface only occasionally.