Volteo Demi Tasse Pot

A demitasse pot in the Volteo pattern with an ebony handle set at a right angle, this is a later, contemporary-styled coffee form from Spratling's hollowware, made in three sizes and well recorded across the literature. It appears in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver, in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver, in La Platería Mexicana, and in Phyllis Goddard's field guide.

The ebony handle supplies the dark-wood-against-silver contrast Morrill identifies across Spratling's table designs (Morrill, p. 224), the right-angle attachment giving the small pot a crisp, modern silhouette. Catalogue prices trace its production: $33.60 wholesale in 1958-59, $36.80 in 1961, and $56 by 1967.

The design was among the coffee and tea sets shown in "The World of William Spratling," the exhibition that toured the United States in 1965 (Morrill, p. 77), and it has since been reissued, marking it as one of the workshop's enduring forms.