Small Dice Ashtray

A small dice ashtray, its lid hinged on two sides to open down the middle, with two cigarette holders, turns a smoking accessory into a piece of playful silver design. The dice form is the kind of witty, distilled object Spratling produced in his holloware, function and game folded into one.

The two-way hinged lid is a real piece of bench engineering, the kind of mechanical detail his First Period workshop executed by hand. Made in two sizes, of which this is the smaller, it was a design Spratling thought worth offering at more than one scale.

Small novelty smoking objects in silver survive in smaller numbers than his jewelry, and the dice form with its split hinged lid is a recognizable Spratling conceit.