Twelve Half Ball Bar Brooch

A long bar brooch punctuated by twelve silver half-balls belongs to the most elemental vocabulary of the early Taxco workshop, where the unadorned hemisphere did so much of the design work. The little balls were not cast as ornament but built up by hand: a thin wire cut into rings, melted on a slab of asbestos until each ring drew itself into a bead (Morrill, p. 36). Repeated twelve times across a single bar, the form becomes a rhythm rather than a picture.

The piece dates from the first design period at Las Delicias, the taller William Spratling established in Taxco in 1931, the workshop that anchored the Mexican silver revival. Its appeal is its restraint. There is no stone, no figure, only the play of light across a row of polished domes and the proportion of the bar that carries them.

Worn long across a lapel or collar, a bar brooch of this kind reads as quietly architectural, the kind of early Spratling design that rewards a collector looking past the figural pieces to the grammar underneath them.