Champagne Goblet with Spiral Stem

A champagne goblet with a spiral-wire stem and a gold-washed bowl is one of the more inventive forms to come out of Spratling's holloware line, and the wire motif has a documented origin. Spratling first used this theme of diagonal silver wires in a letter opener he designed as one of the roughly two hundred models prepared for the Alaska project in 1949 (Morrill, p. 67), an extraordinary commission in which he was asked to design a craft line for Alaska's native artisans. A decorative idea born in that work was carried back into his own tableware.

The goblet is well documented. It appears in Spratling Silver by Cederwall and Riney, in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver, in La Plateria Mexicana, and in Phyllis Goddard's field guide. It was the first in a series, with wine, cocktail, water, and liqueur sizes following, and it was included in the 1965 traveling U.S. museum exhibit The World of William Spratling. Surviving catalogues give its wholesale price as $28 in 1961 and $30.80 in 1967.

The spiral stem is the heart of the design, a single twist of silver lifting the gold-washed bowl, the wash warming the interior against the cool of the surrounding metal.

The design has been reissued, so collectors weigh period of manufacture and the presence of the gold wash when comparing examples, and its breadth of documentation makes it one of the more securely placed pieces in the Spratling holloware canon.