Ovalado Coffee Pot

An oval coffee pot in the Ovalado pattern, distinguished by a handle attachment shaped as the cross-section of a conch shell, this is an early service design in which a natural form is abstracted into a structural detail. It is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and in Penny Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance.

The conch-shell cross-section at the handle joint shows Spratling drawing on natural and Mexican forms even in the engineering of a pot, the rosewood handle answering the silver body in his characteristic material pairing (Morrill, p. 224). The pot was also made with a silver handle in place of the rosewood.

As an early Ovalado-pattern service piece, it belongs to the coffee and tea hollowware that became central to the workshop's output.