Large Silver Serving Spoon of Early American Design

Flatware in Spratling's numbered design range appears far less often than his celebrated jewelry, and a tablespoon carrying design 2525 represents an uncommon category of his output. The piece dates to the Second Design Period, when Spratling continued studio production under a reorganized workshop and brought the same modernist reduction he applied to brooches and bracelets to bear on domestic silverware.

The form is uncompromising in its discipline. A long, flat handle widens toward a broad oval terminal, narrows to a clean step at the shoulder, then meets the hammered bowl with no flourish at the join. The entire surface is hand-worked, leaving a lively, irregular faceting that animates the sterling in changing light. No applied ornament, chasing, or carved motif interrupts the planes — the interest is held entirely in the proportions and the evidence of the maker's hand. Morrill notes that Spratling's hand-wrought flatware and holloware maintained production methods that changed little across the decades, a consistency visible in every hammer mark here. The circular SPRATLING / MADE IN MEXICO workshop stamp and the Eagle 30 assay mark — the government quality guarantee Morrill describes — together confirm sterling composition and Second Period attribution.

Examples carrying legible double hallmarks in this condition offer an unusually clear record of the workshop's functional output at its most stripped-down.