Silver Hummingbird Necklace

A hummingbird worked in silver and obsidian gives this necklace its subject, the bird drawn from the same Pre-Columbian sources that ran through the Taxco workshop's design imagination. The hummingbird was a recognized Spratling motif: Morrill records that the workshop's hummingbird pin was among the Las Delicias designs based on models from Monte Albán's Tomb 7, reworked rather than copied (Morrill, p. 38). The design is noted as having won a Bank of Mexico national award.

The 1932 Tomb 7 finds, in gold, jade, obsidian, and turquoise, revealed the brilliance of the Mixtec goldsmiths and were widely published, and Spratling moved within the circle of Alfonso Caso, who made the discovery (Morrill, pp. 38, 76). A hummingbird in silver and obsidian sits at exactly that intersection of ancient source and modern execution.

Recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver volume, in Littleton's biography of Spratling, and in Morrill's Maestros de Plata study, the necklace is a well-documented example of the workshop's Pre-Columbian-derived jewelry, its recorded award marking it as a design that drew recognition in its own time.