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The large jaguar coffee pot is the centerpiece of Spratling's most celebrated holloware design, the jaguar giving the silver body its form and the ebony its handle. That the design was produced in two sizes signals how successful it was, a model carried in his catalogues rather than a one-off.
The jaguar belongs to Spratling's deliberate turn toward Pre-Columbian sources, the strategy that set his silver apart from the European and Colonial models then traditional in Mexico (Morrill, p. 39). On a coffee pot, the animal becomes both ornament and silhouette.
Coffee and tea services in this vein were shown in the 1965 McNay exhibition of his work (Morrill, p. 77).
The piece is recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver volumes, La Platería Mexicana, and Penny Morrill's Maestros de Plata.
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