Salad Server Fork of Rosewood

A salad server fork carved entirely from rosewood, its handle decorated with wrapped wire, this piece inverts the usual hierarchy of Spratling's flatware, making the wood the body and the silver a binding accent. It is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and in the El Arte en la Vida Diaria exhibition catalogue.

The wrapped-wire decoration is the small linear motif Spratling used to articulate carved wood, the warm material contrasted with the metal exactly as Morrill describes across his table designs (Morrill, p. 224). Making the fork primarily of rosewood shows the workshop's range in working the wood as a sculptural material in its own right.

Salad servers of this kind were among the objects listed in the 1965 "World of William Spratling" exhibition inventory (Morrill, p. 77).