Amethyst and Agate Zig-Zag Cuff

Stacked silver bands rise and fall in a bold chevron across this wide open cuff, three registers of hand-wrought metal pitched into peaks and valleys so the whole band reads as one piece of taut, sculptural geometry. The strength is structural rather than applied, heavy silver worked into rhythm, and it is exactly the kind of emphatic form William Spratling built in the early years of his Taxco workshop.

Through the central register runs a row of five cabochons, alternating purple amethyst and milky white agate, each held in a plain round bezel. The mix of hardstones breaks the gray sweep of the silver with a measured beat of color, and the smooth domed stones play against the angular wavework that carries them. Color sits inside the geometry, not on top of it.

The cuff is stamped SPRATLING MADE IN MEXICO with the WS mark, placing it in the roughly 1940 to 1946 window of the workshop Spratling founded after he set the Taxco silver revival in motion the decade before. The chevron banding and the row of mixed cabochons show the bench skill of the silversmiths who worked his designs in that period, when the pieces were still raised and finished largely by hand.

Built from repeated waves of heavy metal and a single line of native stone, it is Spratling treating a bracelet as architecture, strong silver and quiet color and little else.