Jaguar Cream Pitcher

Topped by a seated jaguar finial and fitted with ebony handles, this covered silver cream pitcher is a sculptural piece of Spratling's renowned Jaguar coffee and tea service. The jaguar finial gives the lid its figural focus, carrying the pre-Columbian feline that Spratling worked as stylized form rather than naturalistic detail (Morrill, p. 73).

The ebony handles bring dark wood against the silver, the metal-and-wood contrast that runs through Spratling's later hollowware. The pitcher functions as one voice within the service, sharing the suite's vocabulary of clean silver bodies and figural accents.

As with the matching sugar bowl, the finial carries a nuance: Spratling's catalog photographs picture the creamers and sugar bowls with round ball finials rather than jaguar ones, though many examples with jaguar finials are believed to have been made. The pitcher is recorded in the Centennial Edition of Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver, in La Platería Mexicana, and in Penny Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance: Maestros de Plata.

With that documentation and its standing in the Jaguar service, the pitcher is a well-anchored example of Spratling's figural hollowware, which comes to market only occasionally.