Large Mahogany Salad Bowl

Highly figured mahogany, ringed at the rim with inset silver discs, is exactly the kind of wood-and-silver object that made Spratling's table service distinctive. The grain of the wood carries the piece; the silver appears only as a rhythmic band of discs at the top, the metal subordinate to the material it borders.

This marriage of native hardwood and silver was central to Spratling's holloware, and his salad servers and wood objects were prominent enough to appear in the 1965 McNay exhibition inventory of his work (Morrill, p. 77). The recurring applied disc is his way of resolving where wood meets metal.

The bowl is recorded in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver field guide, the standard reference for identifying his production.