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An oval sugar bowl raised on a domed rim, its handles shaped as the cross-section of a conch shell, shows Spratling pulling a Mexican natural form into functional silver. The conch-section, a motif he used across pieces, becomes the handle, marrying ornament to use.
The scrolled, bifurcated conch shell was part of Spratling's design vocabulary (Morrill, p. 124), and here it organizes a piece of table silver from the First Design Period (1931-1946). Such holloware was hand-wrought in his workshop in the manner the literature emphasizes (Morrill, p. 251).
The sugar bowl is recorded in the Cederwall and Riney Spratling Silver volumes and in Penny Morrill's Maestros de Plata.
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