Long Ebony Dish with Inset Silver

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Object record

Catalogue no.: MoMS-000656
Form: Butter Dish
Date: Third Design Period: 1951 - 1967
Materials: Ebony, Silver
Dimensions: 9 5/6" x 2 7/8"

Curatorial note

The only butter dish William Spratling ever designed, this piece pairs a turned ebony body with an inset silver butter well and six silver buttons, a small study in how Spratling married dark tropical wood to precious metal. It appears in Penny Morrill and Carole Berk's Mexican Silver and in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver field guide, and was included in the traveling exhibit "The World of William Spratling" that toured the United States in 1965.

The design belongs to Spratling's Third Design Period (1951 to 1967), and the surviving catalog record fixes its commerce precisely: it sold for $15.60 in the 1961 wholesale catalogue and $18.40 in the 1967 one, and was offered in rosewood at the same price. That documentary trail is what makes Spratling's later holloware so trackable.

Spratling was the American who, after arriving in 1926, became the central figure in the revival of Taxco's silver industry, establishing the Taller de Las Delicias and training the generation that built the Taxco school. A wood-and-silver butter dish is that workshop's design intelligence applied to the table rather than the body.

The design has since been reissued, and any example should be weighed against the catalog record and the marks. As the single butter dish in Spratling's output, it is a distinctive piece for a collector of his holloware.