Ashtray with Silver Coin in Center

A heavy silver ashtray built around a coin, this object incorporates antique Spanish currency directly into its design: the existing record reads an interior coin inscribed "Ferdin del Gratia VII 1819," with a larger Spanish coin set into the reverse beneath. The colonial-era coinage roots the piece in Mexico's Spanish history, the metal of an old empire reset into a modern hand-wrought object.

The heft of the ashtray and the use of a struck coin as its centerpiece make it as much a curio as a utensil, the kind of object in which Spratling married found historical material to his own silver. The colonial reference complements the pre-Columbian sources he drew on elsewhere.

Coin-set objects are an uncommon corner of the workshop's output and are collected as such.