Coffee Pot Is One of Spratling's Earliest Designs

The swelling lower body of this coffee pot — broad at the base, narrowing into a cylindrical drum before reaching the domed lid — announces a compositional logic built from geometric volumes resolved one into the next. The form is among Spratling's earliest designs for a coffee and tea service, and it embodies the workshop's founding conviction that functional hollow ware could hold the same considered geometry as any sculptural piece.

The rosewood handle is the deciding element. Carved with a thumb rest and fixed through a square silver bracket mounted on an applied disc, it sets warm wood grain against the mirror surface of sterling in a material pairing Morrill and Berk trace directly to a shared sensibility with French silversmith Jean Puiforcat — whose rosewood-handled, lightly tapered silver services advanced the same logic of contrast and restraint (Morrill & Berk, Mexican Silver, 1994). Here the bracket at the handle root is not a compromise but a formal declaration: squared in section, plainly presented, made part of the design vocabulary rather than concealed within it.

Made in three sizes. Struck with the joined "WS" hallmark that Morrill identifies as Spratling's earliest workshop mark, pieces from this founding decade carry a particular documentary weight for the history of Taxco silver.