Impressed Circle Tin Bowl

A tin bowl impressed with larger circles on the bottom and smaller circles around the top rim, this First Design Period object shows Spratling getting a graded, decorative rhythm out of a plain folk material. The two scales of impressed circle give the bowl a quiet visual order.

The bowl belongs to Spratling's tinwork, a documented part of his revival of Mexican folk crafts. His workshop produced candlesticks, frames, and other tin objects under the tinsmith Don Isidro Mejia (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 36), and this bowl is an example of that program applied to a simple vessel.

The circle is a motif Spratling used across his work in various materials, and impressing it into tin at two sizes is a hand technique that turns an undecorated bowl into a designed object.

Tin pieces survive in much smaller numbers than Spratling's silver and are easily overlooked, so a documented tin bowl is a useful record of the folk-craft side of the workshop's First Period output.