Coralillo Cheese Board

A rosewood cheese board inset with silver bands set diagonally along its perimeter edges, this is one of Spratling's fully documented table designs, made under the pattern name Coralillo and extended into a carving set, flatware, and a companion cheese knife. It is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and in Phyllis Goddard's field guide.

The diagonal silver banding on warm rosewood is the material contrast Morrill places at the center of Spratling's table designs (Morrill, p. 224), and the design was esteemed enough that Spratling's maestro Marcial Chavez received the Sexto Premio del Estado de Veracruz for his craftsmanship in making it. Wholesale prices ran from $28 in 1958-59 to $33.60 in 1967, and it was made in two sizes, this being the smaller.

The board was among the objects gathered for "The World of William Spratling," the exhibition organized by John Leeper of the McNay Art Institute that opened in March 1965 and traveled to several U.S. museums (Morrill, p. 77). It is currently to held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) along with the matching knife.

Later reissued in ebony, the Coralillo cheese board shows how a single banded-wood-and-silver idea became a whole family of table objects.