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A salt dish in the "discos" pattern, this small piece carries a motif of applied discs set over pierced areas, a treatment Spratling used extensively in the Second Design Period (1949 to 1951). The disc-over-piercing motif turns a tiny functional object into a study in the design language of that period.
Small holloware like salt dishes was part of the workshop's table production, hand-wrought alongside the jewelry (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, pp. 53, 251). The "discos" name fixes the pattern in Spratling's vocabulary.
The applied disc over a pierced ground was one of Spratling's recurring surface ideas in this period, the same motif he carried forward into later pieces such as his "wrought silver shell" work. Seeing it on a salt dish shows how he applied a single design language across objects of very different scale.
Small table silver of this kind survives in modest numbers, and a documented example in a named Second Period pattern is a useful, compact record of that design vocabulary.
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