Salt Spoon with Ebony Bowl

A salt spoon is the smallest unit of Spratling's table silver, and this one compresses his material game into a few centimeters: an ebony bowl, a silver ball at the neck, and a silver handle. The dark wood against bright silver is the same contrast he worked at full scale in hollowware, here at the most intimate possible size.

The ebony-and-silver pairing recurs across his late tableware; Morrill records ebony-and-silver objects from the same circle of designs in the 1950s (Morrill, p. 73). The form is unornamented, the design carried entirely by the junction of wood, ball, and handle.

The spoon wholesaled at $1.12 in 1958-59 and $1.36 in 1967 and has been reissued. Small serving pieces like this are easily separated over the decades, so an original with its ebony bowl uncracked and an early mark is the find.