Duck Head Bottle Opener

A bottle opener cast as a large duck head, with turquoise eyes and the opener set at the base, is Spratling at his most playful: a functional object given an animal form and a touch of whimsy. The turquoise eyes are the only color, set into otherwise plain silver.

That sense of whimsy applied to a useful object runs through Spratling's design thinking, as in the walrus-head letter opener he drew for the Alaska project (Morrill, p. 66). The duck belongs to his First Design Period (1931-1946), when animal forms entered his vocabulary.

The bottle opener is recorded in Penny Morrill's Maestros de Plata.