Knot Button

This button takes a single twisted, knotted form and renders it as a compact sculptural object: a swirled rosette of silver whose ridges spiral inward toward a raised central boss, the whole reading as a coil of worked metal caught in motion. The knot is a form that is at once decorative and structural, its interlacing giving a small round object a sense of continuous, turning movement. Where a plain button lets the metal speak through surface alone, this one earns its interest through modeling, the play of light down each twisted ridge doing the work that a stone or an inlay might do elsewhere.

Objects like this belonged to the everyday production of Spratling's Taller de Las Delicias, the workshop he founded in 1931 and grew within a few years into an industry of nearly a hundred artisans making jewelry, hollowware, and small silver goods (Morrill and Berk, pdf p. 15). Spratling's ambition was to build a Mexican silver tradition on good design and fine craftsmanship, and even his smallest forms carry that discipline: a knotted button is a well-resolved miniature, a motif worked cleanly enough to bear close looking. The spiral knot also belongs to a long decorative lineage, and its appearance here in silver shows the workshop turning a familiar form into a crisp, repeatable small object.

No date, provenance, or published reference is attached to this button. Small modeled buttons of this kind were made in quantity across the workshop's life, so the type is not rare; the value of a surviving example lies in its clean execution and the Spratling silver mark it bears. It is a characteristic, competently designed product of that everyday production rather than a unique design.

The button deserves museum inclusion as a record of Spratling's small-format work, the modest, well-made objects that ran alongside the celebrated jewelry and hollowware. It lets a collection represent the workshop's full range, from masterwork to everyday form, and preserves a clean expression of a decorative motif made under a foundational Taxco hallmark.