Streamlined Silver Belt Buckle

A streamlined silver belt buckle, this piece carries the smooth, pared aesthetic of Spratling's later years, the form reduced to a clean flowing outline with no stone or applied ornament to distract from the metal. The streamlining is the design, a confident reliance on silhouette alone.

The buckle dates to Spratling's Third Design Period, 1951 to 1967, the final and for many his most inventive phase, when he pushed the play of form in handwrought silver. Belt buckles ran from the heavy early pieces of his first year through to these refined late designs, and the streamlined form represents the mature end of that lineage.

The piece is recorded in the literature, appearing in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver, the principal reference for his work. A streamlined silver buckle documented there sits within the recognized corpus of his late objects, a clean statement of form from the workshop's final decade.