Individual Butter Knife

This individual butter knife, a silver blade on a rosewood handle, carries a documented exhibition history. A knife with the earlier "WS Print" hallmark was one of nineteen Spratling pieces shown at the Brooklyn Museum's "Contemporary Industrial & Hand wrought Silver" from November 1937 to January 1938.

The museum's own staff recorded the reception. Louise Chase of the Industrial Art Department wrote to Spratling that the case holding his silver was "one of the most admired in the Exhibition," shown against a dark red woolen ground that toned with the wood handles, and that as the only Mexican craftsmanship in the show it had drawn "a great deal of attention and admiration."

The same design reached a far wider audience through Montgomery Ward, which sold it in 1943 for $2.25 as a "butter or fruit" knife. Spratling silver was featured in the Montgomery Ward catalogues across the 1943 to 1946 years (Morrill, p. 257), bringing hand-wrought Taxco work to the American mail-order market.

The knife is documented in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver: 20th Century Handwrought Jewelry & Metalwork and in the 1943 Montgomery Ward Christmas Book.