Mahogany Salad Bowl

A mid-sized salad bowl turned from mahogany and inset around its top perimeter with four silver discs. The composition is characteristic of Spratling's third-period table objects: a warm wooden body punctuated by small, deliberate accents of silver, so that the metal reads as ornament against the grain rather than as structure.

This pairing of silver with figured wood was a recurring strategy. Morrill connects Spratling's combining of materials and his geometric approach to form with the French silversmith Puiforcat, whose holloware set silver against rosewood and other woods to similar effect (Morrill, p. 224). The four discs here do that work economically.

Salad bowls and servers were a staple of the workshop's output and were among the categories shown in the 1965 McNay exhibition of Spratling's work (Morrill, p. 77).

Wooden hollowware survives less reliably than silver, so bowls of this kind with their silver accents intact are not common at market.