Spoon with Rat Tail, Hammered Bowl

Spratling called this a ladle: a rat-tail spoon with a hammered bowl whose handle turns at the top to form a leaf. The leaf terminal is the piece's distinguishing note, and it did not stand alone, the same leaf motif appearing in earrings made during the same period.

That crossover between flatware and jewelry is characteristic of Spratling's First Design Period, dated 1931 to 1946, when a single motif would migrate across object types so that a design idea worked itself out in several forms at once. The hammered bowl carries the handwork of the founding years.

The rat-tail back and the leaf handle are both deliberate echoes of historical silver reworked in the Taxco manner. Early handwrought ladles of this kind surface only occasionally.