William Spratling sterling Amethyst pre-columbian style pin 1 5/8" tall x 1 1/16" wide.
Spratling, an architect and artist who taught at Tulane University in New<br>Orleans, came to Mexico in the late 1920s and settled in the city of Taxco.<br>Having developed an interest in Mesoamerican archaeology and culture from his<br>colleagues at Tulane, he traveled to Mexico for several summers lecturing and<br>exploring. He sought out remote villages in the state of Guerrero, 110 miles<br>from Mexico City, where in some places Nahuatl, the Aztec language, was spoken.<br>Spratling collected artifacts and contemporary indigenous crafts. Spratling made<br>a fortune manufacturing and designing silver, but his true life's work was to<br>conserve, redeem, and interpret the ancient culture of his adopted country. He<br>explained for North American audiences the paintings of Mexico's modern masters<br>and earned distinction as a learned and early collector of pre-Columbian art.<br>Spratling and his workshop gradually became a visible and culturally attractive<br>link between a steady stream of notable American visitors and the country they<br>wanted to see and experience. Spratling had the rare good fortune to witness his<br>own reputation -- as one of the most admired Americans in Mexico -- assume<br>legendary status before his death. William Spratling, His Life and Art vividly<br>reconstructs this richly diverse life whose unique aesthetic legacy is but a<br>part of its larger cultural achievement of profoundly influencing Americans'<br>attitudes toward a civilization different from their own.
