Disco Pattern Oval Silver Sauce Bowl

An oval sauce bowl in the Disco pattern shows how Spratling thought in shapes that could migrate across an object family: this same bowl form recurs in several of his designs rather than being made once for a single use. It belongs to his Second Design Period, the brief 1949-51 stretch that followed his Alaska work and his 1949 contract with Conquistador (Morrill, p. 257).

The Disco vocabulary, built on the flat silver disc, ran through his tableware in these years. Morrill records that the earliest version of this bowl shape appears in two of the Alaskan models Spratling designed in 1949, and the present design followed within less than a year, placing it at the hinge between the Alaska project and the resumed Mexican production (Morrill, p. 66).

The bowl is recorded in Morrill's Maestros de Plata. A clean original, read by its hallmark and proportion, ties a serving piece directly to one of the most documented turns in Spratling's career.