Plain Silver Salt Dish

A salt dish reduced to its simplest possible form, this piece is significant precisely for its plainness: an unornamented silver vessel that lets proportion and the quality of the handwrought metal carry the whole design. The restraint is deliberate, the object pared to its essential outline in the manner Spratling brought to his holloware.

The dish was included in his wholesale catalogues for only a few years in the late 1950s but appears to have been made from the early 1950s into the mid-1960s, a longer working life than its brief catalog presence suggests. It rewards comparison with a similarly simple and plain salt dish Spratling made in the early 1940s, the two together showing how he returned to the same austere problem across two decades.

A plain silver salt is among the quieter objects in his catalog, and unmarked simple forms of this kind are easily overlooked. Its interest lies in being a sustained exercise in reduction, the kind of unornamented table silver that demonstrates Spratling's confidence in form alone.