Arrow Inlaid Butter Knife

A butter knife with a silver blade and a silver arrow-and-circle inlay set into a rosewood handle carries a direct trace of one of Spratling's most documented projects. The design appears to derive from his Alaska work and the roughly two hundred models he created for it; Morrill records that his description of the comparable model knife was "ivory baleen arrow inlay, stainless steel blade" (Morrill, p. 66). Here the same arrow-and-circle idea is rendered in silver inlaid into rosewood.

The Alaska project, undertaken in 1945 and carried into 1949 when Alaska natives trained at his ranch, produced flatware, goblets, candlesticks, and jewelry in native materials, and its design vocabulary fed back into his Mexican production (Morrill, p. 257). The same knife design was also made in ebony.

The knife is recorded in Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. A clean original with intact rosewood and inlay, read by its hallmark, ties a serving piece to the Alaska episode in his career.

The Wolfsonian-FIUMiami Beach, United States

Butter knife, 1931-1967

Accession TD1991.77.3. Official museum record Photo: The Wolfsonian-FIU.

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