The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco [Hardcover]

Joan T. Mark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2000

This book is the story of William Spratling, remembered most for his design work in silver, and his life in Taxco, Mexico, where he lived from 1929 until his death in 1967. Spratling was an artist, architect, writer, bon vivant, and passionate collector of Mexican folk art and archaeological artifacts. His friends included William Faulkner, Diego Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, and many writers, artists, actors, and other famous and infamous people who pass through the pages of this lively book.

In 1929 Spratling left the French Quarter in New Orleans and bought a house in Taxco, a small mining town in the Sierra Madre south of Mexico City. Within five years he had written a classic book about the town, Little Mexico, and founded a business in the hand production of silver jewelry that would make him a rich man, at least briefly, and Taxco famous. He drew other artistic expatriates to Taxco until it became a cluster of creative people like that around Gertrude Stein in Paris or Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos.

Illustrated with photographs of his silver work and his gallery as well as Spratling's own drawings, this book is the first to look at all aspects of Spratling's life and career and show what an extraordinary and multitalented man he was.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Mark, a research associate at Harvard's Peabody Museum and author of four anthropological titles, here focuses on a singular cultural phenomenon. William Spratling, an American writer, illustrator, and draftsman who lived in Taxco, Mexico, from 1929 until his death in 1967, almost single-handedly transformed an impoverished mining town into a prosperous silver manufacturing center. The simple elegance that made his work so popular (and now collectible) owed much to the influence of the ancient Mexican artifacts he amassed. Based on exhaustive research, interviews, and photographic study, Mark's book details Spratling's successful production and marketing of fine-quality, hand-crafted silver jewelry and related items. Mark's work succeeds more as a business history than as a biography, perhaps because of the intensely private nature of the man, but her approach is both scholarly and accessible. Most public and academic libraries will welcome this complement to the few available works on Mexican silverwork.
-Rex Klett, Mitchell Community Coll., Statesville, NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Joan Mark is a research associate in the History of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. She is the author of four other books and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826320791
• ISBN-13: 978-0826320797
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,476,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview into the life of William Spratling, January 7, 2003

By 

JDiver "You haven't lived until you've dived." (Roseville, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco (Hardcover)

Don Guillermo, as he was known in Taxco, was an American architect who came upon an impoverished if beautiful Mexican village in the mountains of the state of Guerrero. Stimulated by financial desperation and a challenge from a friend, he hired a silversmith from nearby Iguala and kicked off the renaissance of Mexican silverwork- initially from a table in his house, and ultimately a large workshop turning out exemplary tin, copper, weaving, furniture and, of course, silver. Almost all the smiths who carried out the Taxco tradition were trained in the Spratling workshop.

This eminently readable book tells the tale, though it is certainly not one of those comprehensive 600-page biographies, nor does it become overly speculative about a man who was respected and loved for his creativity and for giving impulse to a craft that made the community relatively wealthy, but also made some mistakes and enemies. (Yep, he was special, and very human!) That is, in my opinion, part of its charm.

This book is a bit topical, yet it manages to convey the excitement of the resurrection of a Mexican village that became an entrepot of artists, writers and would-be revolutionaries, and- for good and for bad- a huge tourist destination. It gives more than a glimmer of the many facets of Don Guillermo / Bill Spratling, a man who intended to find respite and refuge, resuscitated a community and gave many livelihood, and largely withdrew from that same community in his last years.

This is written from a perspective of someone who was privileged to know Taxco, since as a youngster I hung around the talleres- especially of Hector Aguilar and the Castillo family- developing a love of Mexican silver and some rudimentary smithing skills of my own.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Little Spratling, October 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco (Hardcover)

This pricy but slim volume (126 actual pages of text and photos), is written like a freshman essay. There are facts, but little that illuminates or gives insight into this unusual personality who founded the silver industry in Taxco. It is neither insightful or clever and a biography must have one of these characteristics. Much research seems to have been done, but with little result.