Conch and Obsidian Brooch

A five-pointed conch, or star, supports an oval disc of obsidian in this brooch, joining a worked silver form to a stone with deep Mexican resonance. Obsidian was a material the pre-Columbian world prized, and Spratling's workshop drew openly on that heritage, marrying a native element to a clean modern silhouette much as the Taxco designers married Pre-Columbian motifs to European utilitarian objects (Morrill, p. 135).

The black oval reads as a deliberate counterweight to the radiating silver points, the polished stone absorbing light where the metal reflects it. The ambiguity of the form, conch or star, is part of its appeal.

The brooch sits squarely in the early Taxco idiom that made Spratling's Las Delicias the engine of the Mexican silver revival from 1931 onward, and obsidian-set pieces remain among the most characteristic survivals from that period.