Button with Stamped Type Design

A silver button bearing a stamped type design is one of the small, easily overlooked objects that show how completely Spratling's design vocabulary carried across scales, the same motif serving a button here and a belt buckle elsewhere. Stamping a worked pattern into sheet silver was among the workshop's basic techniques from its earliest years.

Spratling described his First Period sources as "almost literal copies of Aztec and Colonial motives," with pre-Columbian seals sawed out of heavy sheet silver and polished into brooches (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 156). A stamped button operates in that same economy of a single die or pattern reused across forms.

The button is recorded in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver: 20th Century Handwrought Jewelry & Metalwork. Small accessories like this surface only occasionally, the matching buckle making it part of a recognizable design family.