'River of Life' Amethyst Cuff Bracelet

Few Spratling forms carry his design language as completely as this one: a broad cuff in which the silver itself is made to move. The metal is worked into parallel undulating bands, a current of waves running the full width of the wrist, and into that current are set seven amethyst cabochons, each cradled in a rope-twist bezel and punctuated by small applied silver bosses. This is the model collectors and dealers know as the "River of Life," a design Spratling himself reportedly described as a wide Aztec bracelet with framed buttons. It was among the most popular things to come out of his Taxco workshop.

The piece sits squarely in Spratling's First Design Period. The conjoined WS struck on the back is the mark he adopted from the brand he used for his horses and stamped on every design that left his bench, an act of authorship that other Taxco smiths soon imitated, and which here is dated to roughly 1940 to 1946; the accompanying SPRATLING SILVER stamp belongs to the same window (Morrill & Berk, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 39). The amethyst is no incidental choice. The cabochon amethyst set against heavy hand-wrought silver was one of the signatures of his work in the late 1930s and 1940s; Mexican Silver opens with exactly such a piece, a chunky amethyst-cabochon necklace described as timeless because it looked as contemporary in the 1980s as it had in the '40s (Morrill & Berk, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 12).

What distinguishes this cuff is how the construction reads as a single idea carried out at scale. The waved bands are not applied ornament on a plain shank but the body of the bracelet, so the seven stones appear to float on flowing water, the roped bezels and silver beads supplying the rhythm. It is substantial on the wrist, broad and deliberately weighty in the way Spratling's best cuffs were meant to be, the mass of the silver doing as much expressive work as the stones.