Rosewood and Silver Walrus Letter Opener

The blade is silver and the handle a carved sheath of rosewood, the two materials meeting in a letter opener whose nickname, the "walrus," points to its real origin. The form descends from the Alaska crafts program Spratling undertook at the end of the 1940s, for which he designed a letter opener with a silver blade and a handle shaped as a walrus head, its forms, as Morrill records, "strengthened by abstraction" (Morrill, p. 66). The Taxco version carries that abstracted, comfortable shape into rosewood.

The object belongs to the First Design Period and shows Spratling's habit of marrying silver to a warm organic material, here a dark tropical hardwood, so that the metal reads as an accent rather than the whole. The handling is functional and sculptural at once, a desk object made to be picked up.

This piece is recorded in Penny C. Morrill's William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance: Maestros de Plata, and per the existing record appears only in the December 1945 Spratling wholesale catalog, a single-catalog appearance that makes surviving examples scarce.

Letter openers and desk pieces were a minor part of the output beside the jewelry, and documented examples like this one are infrequently seen.