Demitasse Spoon with Wrapped Silver Wire

Wrapped silver wire encircles the neck of this baby spoon, the single device that gives an otherwise plain form its Spratling signature. Wire wrapping was among his favorite flatware motifs, threading through his work from the late 1930s onward.

The technique drew on the wire pulled to gauge in the Taxco workshops, where it was standard stock for the smiths (Morrill, p. 36). On a baby spoon the wrapping is reduced to a single band, the motif at its most economical.

Made for only a very short period in the later 1950s, the spoon is recorded in Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. Its brief production makes it one of the scarcer of the small Spratling forms. It is one of almost 30 Spratling objects held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art