Identification Bracelet

Few Spratling pieces are documented in such concrete commercial terms as this identification bracelet: a May 19, 1945 letter from Montgomery Ward records that Spratling had "just completed shipping us our order for 15,000 Identification bracelets, our #7457." The scale of that single order is a vivid measure of how far his First Period silver reached into the American mail-order market.

The bracelet was sold through the Fall 1945 Montgomery Ward catalog under that number. Morrill notes that by 1945 the relationship had grown strained over silver standards and the use of the oval "Spratling Silver" mark, and that the Fall 1945 catalogue carried only this hand-wrought identification bracelet of Spratling silver (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 53).

Spratling produced the design in three sizes, and it appeared in his own catalogs only in 1944 and 1945, a narrow window despite the volume shipped.

The bracelet is recorded in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver: 20th Century Handwrought Jewelry & Metalwork. Its documented order history makes it a touchstone for the commercial chapter of Spratling's career.