Letter Opener with Tortoise Shell Blade

Among the best-documented small objects Spratling made, this letter opener pairs a tortoise-shell blade with a silver handle wrapped in wire and studded with buttons, recorded across five separate references and his own catalogue. He described it precisely as a letter opener with a flat oval handle and a tortoise lance, even as some came to call it a caviar knife.

A closely related all-silver version with 18-karat gold discs appears in his catalogue, and Spratling's own drawing of a similar motif survives in the William Spratling Folio of Drawings. The piece carried a late-1950s wholesale price and another in 1967, and it was among the silver shown in the 1965 traveling exhibition The World of William Spratling, which toured American museums alongside his Pre-Columbian collection (Morrill, p. 77). It is recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver, the Folio of Drawings, the El Arte en la Vida Diaria exhibition record, Morrill's Maestros de Plata, and Goddard's field guide.

That unusually deep documentary trail, from drawing to catalogue to museum show, makes this letter opener one of the more thoroughly attested objects in Spratling's range, and the tortoise-shell blade with a wrapped, buttoned silver handle is a distinctly recognizable design.