Beaded Ebony Salt Shaker

A salt shaker is the kind of small domestic object on which Spratling's design vocabulary reads most clearly, and this one states it plainly: a column of ebony banded by three rows of three vertical silver balls. The same pairing of dark tropical hardwood and bright silver that defined Spratling's hollowware appears here at table scale, the contrast of materials doing the work that ornament would do elsewhere.

The piece belongs to a set, and the silver-bead motif is among the most recurrent in Spratling's late tableware. Beads were a Taxco staple by the time this was made, produced in quantity in the workshops Morrill describes (Morrill, p. 36), and Spratling used them as punctuation across flatware, jewelry, and serving pieces rather than as a one-off flourish.

That continuity is part of why the model was reissued: it is a coherent statement that survived the transition from the original workshops to later production. The design is recorded in the standard Spratling references, including Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and Goddard's field guide, which document the catalog history of pieces like this one.

For collectors, ebony-and-silver table objects sit at the accessible end of Spratling's output while carrying his full design signature, and complete sets in this idiom come to market only occasionally.