Taper Stick Candlestick

A swirl of silver rising from a shallow dish, this taper stick distills a candleholder to a single sculptural gesture. Recorded in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver field guide, the design appears in Spratling's catalogues only briefly, around 1957, suggesting it was made for just a year or two.

The rising swirl gives the small object an upward movement uncommon in tableware, an example of how Spratling treated even functional silver as form first. Candleholders were a staple of the workshop's hollowware, listed among the objects shown in the 1965 "World of William Spratling" traveling exhibition (Morrill, p. 77).

Its short production window makes the taper stick a scarce design that surfaces only occasionally.