Meat Fork

Serving pieces gave Spratling's designs their widest reach, and this meat fork is documented at the moment that reach extended into the American mail-order market. With its projections at the neck, it belongs to the same family as his salad servers, scaled and shaped for carving.

The fork's most telling record is commercial: it was pictured in the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogue of 1943 at $15.00, or $30.00 for the set. Spratling silver appeared in Montgomery Ward catalogues across 1943 to 1946 (Morrill, p. 257), and this fork is one of the pieces that put hand-wrought Taxco flatware into ordinary American homes through a mass retailer.

That catalogue presence marks a particular ambition of the first design period, when Spratling was moving his workshop output toward broader distribution while keeping the pieces hand-made. The form here is plain and functional, the design carried in the silhouette and the neck detailing rather than in applied ornament.

Recorded in the 1943 Montgomery Ward Christmas Book, the fork is a documented first-period serving piece and a small artifact of how Taxco silver crossed into the United States.

Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLos Angeles, California

Salad Servers with Pre-Columbian Motifs, circa 1930

Accession M.2018.68.49.1-.2. Official museum record Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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