Rosewood Link Necklace

Strung as a sequence of elongated rosewood and silver links, this necklace turns Spratling's recurring silver-and-wood pairing into something to be worn rather than set on a table. The alternation of dark wood and bright metal along the length gives the piece its rhythm, the links reading as a deliberate pattern strung on cord.

Wood was a material Spratling returned to throughout his career, and his pairing of silver with rosewood and ebony runs across his jewelry, boxes, and holloware alike. Here the contrast does the design work: the warmth and grain of the hardwood against the cool reflectivity of silver, with neither material subordinate to the other.

The necklace is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver, the principal photographic record of his output. As a documented design in mixed materials it represents the strain of Spratling's jewelry that leaned on natural materials as much as on metal, and such pieces appear at auction only occasionally.