Ashtray with Rope Design and Applied Silver Circles

A working object treated as a designed one, this rosewood-mounted ashtray belongs to the holloware Spratling developed alongside his jewelry in the first years of the Taller de Las Delicias. The rope border and the row of applied silver circles are an early outing for a vocabulary of dots and discs that would recur throughout his work, here set against the dark warmth of tropical hardwood.

The pairing of silver with rosewood is characteristic of Spratling's approach to local materials. Rather than treat the wood as a mere base, the design lets the two materials answer each other, the cool reflective metal against the close grain of the wood, so that an everyday item carries the same compositional care as a piece of jewelry.

Las Delicias, founded in 1931, fused twentieth-century production with Mexican craft traditions, and its tablewares circulated as readily as its silver. Pieces like this established the dot-and-circle motif that Spratling continued to refine; Morrill notes the silver dots on wood as a device he used extensively, lending his objects "a sense of playfulness and sophistication" (Morrill, p. 73).

The piece is recorded in Spratling Silver in Taxco and in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. As a documented first-period object combining the applied circle with a rosewood mount, it sits among the early holloware that defined the studio's domestic line and is encountered only occasionally on the market.