Child's Fork

The wire-wrapped handle of this child's fork carries the Amarres pattern, one of Spratling's signature flatware designs built from bound silver wire. Scaled for a child, it shows how completely his patterns were treated as a permanent repertoire, applied across the full range of table pieces and later reissued.

Amarres, from the Spanish for bindings or lashings, takes the wrapping of wire as its organizing idea, a motif Spratling carried through his flatware. That this design was reissued reflects the continuity of his patterns: Spratling's flatware was hand-wrought throughout, and the Sucesores de William Spratling continued producing his designs by techniques little changed in fifty years (Morrill, p. 251).

The wire wrapping gives even a small fork a worked, tactile handle, the binding pattern reading clearly at any scale. It is the same vocabulary that runs through his Amarres serving pieces.

The fork is recorded in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver and in Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide, an unusually full documentary record for a child's piece.