Teardrop Earrings

A simple teardrop, repeated as a pair of earrings, this is an early Spratling form whose paper trail runs straight through his workshop's catalogs. It appeared in a 1938 catalog as number AR-14 and continued through 1945 as AR-731, the renumbering tracking the evolution of his cataloguing in the First Design Period.

The teardrop sits among the plain, elemental shapes Spratling's taller made from the start, alongside the half-dome earrings Morrill names as some of the very first objects it produced (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 156). Around 1940 the style was also made with amethyst, the workshop's habit of offering one form in more than one material.

That a single earring design carries two catalog numbers across seven years makes it a useful marker of how Spratling's early production was organized and sold.