Small Pitcher Earrings

Silver earrings shaped as small pitchers, copied from typical Mexican earthenware, these reached an American audience through Montgomery Ward, whose 1943 Christmas catalogue offered them as "Silver pitcher ear drops copied from typical Mexican earthenware. $4.95." They are recorded in the Montgomery Ward catalogues of 1943 and 1944.

The miniature pitcher form translates a piece of Mexican folk pottery into precious metal, the kind of vernacular source Spratling drew on throughout his early work. Spratling silver was featured in the Montgomery Ward catalogues from 1943 to 1946 (Morrill, p. 257), and these earrings are a direct record of that mail-order chapter.

The catalogue's own description, fixing both the earthenware source and the $4.95 price, makes the earrings a rare contemporary document of how Spratling's Mexican-inspired jewelry was sold to wartime American buyers.