Choluteca Brooch on Obsidian

An older starfish, or Choluteca, design given new life by mounting it on a thin slice of obsidian, this brooch shows William Spratling reworking his own back catalog, the silver starfish here made slightly larger than the earlier version and set against dark Mexican glass. It appears in Spratling Silver by Sandraline Cederwall and Hal Riney and in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver field guide.

The reworked design was produced between 1956 and 1967, with matching earrings also made. Setting an established silver form onto obsidian is characteristic of how Spratling refreshed earlier ideas in his later periods, the volcanic stone supplying a dark Mexican ground for the pale silver.

Spratling was the American who, after arriving in 1926, became the central figure in reviving Taxco's silver industry, founding the Taller de Las Delicias and training the generation behind the Taxco school. The Choluteca starfish, carried from an earlier period into a new obsidian mount, is that long design memory at work.

The brooch has been reissued, so marks and the obsidian mount matter in dating an example. For a collector, a documented Choluteca-on-obsidian brooch is Spratling reusing and updating his own vocabulary across the decades.

Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLos Angeles, California

Conch Shell Brooch, 1955

Accession M.2015.191.1. Official museum record Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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