Salad Server Spoon with Silver Bowl

A salad server reads as a small argument for handwrought silver as everyday furniture rather than display, and this spoon makes that argument in the quiet vocabulary Spratling reserved for the table: a silver bowl set against a turned rosewood handle capped in silver. The contrast of warm, dense wood with the reflective metal was a deliberate compositional device in Spratling's hollowware and serving pieces, the same union of materials Morrill traces through the Taxco workshops and back to the European modernists like Puiforcat, whose tea sets paired rosewood handles and finials with simple silver forms (Morrill, p. 224).

The server descends from Spratling's program of grounding utilitarian objects in good design rather than ornament. Salad servers were among the silver shown when "The World of William Spratling" toured U.S. museums in 1965, a sign of how fully these table pieces belonged to his recognized output (Morrill, p. 77).

The model carried wholesale across the late catalogs, listed at $24.80 in 1958-59 and $30 by 1967, and is recorded in Spratling Silver by Cederwall and Riney and in Mexican Interiors. It has since been reissued, so period examples are distinguished from later production by mark and finish.

Serving silver of this kind comes to market less often than the jewelry, and a clean original with its rosewood intact rewards the collector who wants Spratling's design intelligence in a piece meant to be handled.