River of Life Cuff Bracelet

The wide-band form — a commanding cuff worked in heavy-gauge silver — represents an idiom central to Spratling's First Design Period output. Across the broad face, parallel undulating lines run the full length of the band, parted at intervals by raised circular discs ringed with narrow bezel collars: precisely the "narrow Aztec rings" Spratling himself named when describing the design. Oxidized recesses between the flowing ridges sharpen the contrast, making the polished discs read as structural punctuation as much as surface ornament.

The visual vocabulary belongs to the early Taller Las Delicias, when Spratling wrote in 1955 that "design ideas in those days were almost literal copies of Aztec and Colonial motives... a starting point for the new work" (Morrill & Berk, Mexican Silver, 1994). The undulating lines and disc-and-ring elements seen here reflect that pre-Columbian derivation rendered as a clean repeating geometry — confident enough to function as a formal system rather than mere decoration. The gauge of the silver reinforces the workshop's aesthetic during this foundational phase, when heaviness of material was itself a design statement.

By the early 1940s this design had acquired enough commercial currency to appear in the Fall 1944 Montgomery Ward catalog, priced at $12.95. That retail placement is an unusual marker for workshop silver of the period, and it documents the reach Spratling's Taller had achieved before the close of the First Design Period — pieces moving through American mass-market channels while retaining their handwrought character.

The convergence of Spratling's own descriptive language for this model, the verifiable retail history, and the cuff's intact sculptural presence places it among the more fully documented examples of First Design Period output.

The Wolfsonian-FIUMiami Beach, United States

Aztec Rings design bracelet, 1930-1939

Accession 2021.25.231. Official museum record Photo: The Wolfsonian-FIU.

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