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Hammered silver gives this open sugar bowl its surface, the hand-raised body resting on a domed base with a banded silver handle on each side that opens into a "V" at the top.
The piece is holloware made the workshop's way, raised and finished by hand. Morrill records that Spratling's silver was hand-wrought by techniques that changed little over the decades (Morrill, p. 251), and the visible hammer texture here is the mark of that process rather than a decorative afterthought.
It belongs to the First Design Period, 1931 to 1946. Spratling had taken up the challenge, posed to him by Ambassador Morrow, of reviving Taxco's silver industry (Morrill, p. 21), and table holloware like this sugar bowl was part of building that revival into a working trade.
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