Elongated Shell Earrings

An elongated shell, drawn out and worked in silver, gives these earrings a natural, organic line characteristic of Spratling's First Design Period. The shell motif belongs to the repertoire of native and natural forms he translated into wearable silver in the workshop's earliest decades.

These earrings reached a national American audience through the mail-order trade, offered in the 1943 Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog for $4.95, part of the arrangement that put Spratling silver into homes far from Taxco. That commercial relationship, and the friction it later generated over silver standards and the Spratling mark, is documented in Morrill (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 53).

A documented catalog appearance ties the earrings to a specific moment in Spratling's reach into the United States.