Carved Aztec Style Silson Horizontal Brooch

A horizontal brooch carved in an Aztec style, this is a Silson piece in silver plate, made under the New York licensing arrangement that mass-produced Spratling designs. The same design was used by Spratling in a cuff bracelet.

The Aztec source is characteristic of Spratling's early vocabulary, the pre-Columbian seals he described as becoming brooches sawed out of heavy sheet silver (Morrill, p. 39). Silson, Inc. of New York was producing Spratling designs by 1941 after his patents were registered in 1940-41 (Morrill, p. 257), and the reuse of the motif across a brooch and a bracelet shows how a single design circulated through formats.

In plate rather than sterling, it documents the licensed American afterlife of Spratling's Taxco motifs.