Covered Sugar Bowl with Silver Ball on Top of Lid

This covered sugar bowl, finished with a silver ball on the lid, belongs to Spratling's Jaguar coffee and tea service, an ebony-and-silver suite organized around the jaguar finials that appear on its coffee and tea pots. The sugar and creamer are shown with these round ball finials in Spratling's original catalogs.

The jaguar is among the Pre-Columbian animal forms Spratling drew into his silver, and its appearance as a finial across a service ties the suite to the deepest source of his design vocabulary. On the sugar bowl the rounded finial stands in for the figural one carried by the pots.

The service is documented in the Centennial Edition of Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver. As part of a named figural service in ebony and silver, the piece sits among the more distinctive of Spratling's hollowware and reaches the market only rarely.