Frog Salt Spoon

The WS cipher, TAXCO MEXICO cartouche, and 925 fineness stamp on this sterling silver bar pin identify it as a numbered studio piece from William Spratling's Taller de Las Delicias — the workshop whose founding in 1931 ignited the Taxco silver revival. Design four hundred twenty-seven places the pin within the numbered output the taller catalogued during those foundational years.

The composition turns on a counterpoint between its two terminals. At one end, a cluster of repoussé leaf and petal forms envelops a small pierced bowl, with rounded bead accents marking the junction with the rod; at the other, a clean polished sphere closes the form. That pairing — dense organic relief resolving into geometric calm — is a compositional rhythm that runs through much of Spratling's early wearable silver, translating Pre-Columbian formal vocabulary into something distinctly modern. Morrill documents that the early workshop had no rolling mills; silver was hammered flat by hand before being fashioned in repoussé or cut and pierced according to each design drawing, and the surfaces of a piece in this mode carry a directness that process produces (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 36).

Spratling marked each design with the joined WS cipher — drawn, as Morrill notes, from the brand he used for his horses — as a deliberate act of identification that tied the work to his name and growing reputation (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 39). Bar pins in this naturalistic, hand-worked mode are uncommon, and this example survives with all three original marks clean and legible.