First Peso Letter Opener

A working desk tool turned into a small statement of Mexican identity, this letter opener sets an old peso coin into a silver blade. The gesture is pure Spratling: the workshop's earliest jewelry had been struck from melted 0.925 silver coins, and here the coin returns intact as ornament rather than raw stock, a reminder of where the metal came from.

The design was a steady catalogue item, listed at $5.60 wholesale in the 1958-59 Spratling catalogue and $6.00 by 1961, the kind of useful object the shop produced alongside its hollowware and jewelry. It belonged to the line of desk and table pieces that gave Spratling silver its range beyond personal adornment.

Its standing is confirmed by its inclusion in "The World of William Spratling," the 1965 exhibition organized by John Leeper of the McNay that toured U.S. museums and showed Spratling's silver alongside his Pre-Columbian collection and work by Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias (Morrill, p. 77).

Functional Spratling objects of this kind survive in smaller numbers than the jewelry, and an example carrying an embedded coin and an exhibition history comes to market only occasionally.