Cufflinks of Ebony and Gilded Silver

Cufflinks in ebony and gilded silver, the dark wood set against a warm gold-toned surface. The pairing is the point: Spratling routinely contrasted silver with the color and density of woods like ebony and rosewood, and gilding the metal here pushes that contrast further, the black ebony reading against gold rather than white silver.

The same design was also made in ebony and 18-karat gold, which shows how Spratling moved a single idea up and down a range of materials and price points. His combining of silver with wood, and his geometric approach to form, place him in the company of the French silversmith Puiforcat, whose work joined silver to rosewood and ivory in a comparable idiom (Morrill, p. 224).

Men's accessories like cufflinks were part of the broad output of the workshop, and the gilded-silver-and-ebony version is the more accessible of the two recorded variants.