Bracelet of Three Tiers of Rectangles Separated by Bronze

Three tiers of flat silver rectangles, locked together at their junctions by bronze balls, give this bracelet a quietly architectural character that is recognizably Spratling. The bronze does more than articulate the joints: its warm, reddish tone reads as a deliberate counter-note to the cooler grey of the silver, the two metals held in taut visual dialogue across the full length of the piece. The geometry is spare and self-contained — rectangle and sphere, nothing borrowed from figural or Pre-Columbian ornament.

The design belongs to Spratling's First Design Period, the years 1931 to 1946 in which he established the formal vocabulary that defined the Taxco silver revival. Pairing silver with bronze was a recurring move of this era — a way of introducing tonal contrast through material alone, without stone or enamel, keeping the object rooted in metal and in craft. Penny C. Morrill records that Spratling silver appeared in the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogues from 1943 to 1946, a period when the workshop was operating at considerable scale, and this bracelet was offered in the wholesale catalogues of 1944 and 1945. Its inclusion in the 1943 Montgomery Ward Christmas Book at $22.95 places it among the accessible, broadly distributed designs of the wartime peak — made in quantity, yet retaining the visual coherence of a considered workshop object.