Bronze Sun Tin Box

A tin box in the shape and roughly the size of Spratling's silver "pillow" box, with an applied bronze sun on its hinged lid, this is an unusual survivor: one of the few Spratling examples in which tin is combined with another metal. The piece sits within his first design period, the years when his Taxco workshop was establishing the forms that would define Mexican modern silver.

The combination is what gives the box its interest. Tin was a humble, locally worked material, and pairing it with a bronze sun on the lid turns an everyday metal into a deliberate decorative statement. The sun applied to the pillow-box form connects the object to the larger family of Spratling boxes while marking it as a material experiment apart from them.

The box is recorded in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide, the reference that catalogs the range of Spratling production. Mixed-metal tin pieces are rare, and an example carrying that documentation is a worthwhile record of Spratling's willingness to work outside silver.