Hammered Silver Salad Fork

A salad server fork in hammered silver, its head a horizontal bar set with three silver beads above a rosewood handle, this is flatware in Spratling's first-period idiom, where the marks of the hammer and the beaded bar are both structure and ornament. It is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver.

The hammered surface and the rosewood handle join the two materials Morrill identifies as central to Spratling's table designs, warm dense wood against reflective silver (Morrill, p. 224). The trio of beads on the crossbar is the kind of small repeated motif he used to give a utilitarian object rhythm.

Serving pieces like this were part of the salad servers shown in the 1965 "World of William Spratling" exhibition's inventory (Morrill, p. 77), placing the form within his recognized output.