Ball End Ebony Spoon

An ebony bowl set on a tapering silver handle finished with a single ball: this spoon distills Spratling's flatware language into one object, the dark wood of the bowl playing against the bright taper of the stem. It was made in a range of sizes from roughly six to eleven and a half inches and was, by the catalog record, a very popular design.

The terminal ball and the wood-and-silver pairing are recurrent Spratling devices, used across his serving pieces so that individual forms read as part of a single family. The same handle shape carried through the line in larger serving spoons, giving the table service visual coherence.

The spoon's catalog history is documented, with a 1958-59 wholesale price of $4.00 rising to $4.40 by 1967, and it appears in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and Goddard's field guide. An alternate hallmark, the WS script squared, was also used on examples of this model.

The design was reissued, which tells its own story about durability. Original-period examples remain the collectible target and surface with some regularity given the model's popularity.