Wavy Silver Letter Opener

A letter opener with a wavy silver blade and a carved eagle on the handle, the bird given silver bead eyes and a silver ball at the end, shows Spratling shaping a desk object into small sculpture. The carved eagle, a charged figure in Mexican and pre-Columbian imagery, turns the handle into the piece's focus, the rosewood worked into the bird's form and the silver supplying eyes and finial.

The sculptural, animal-headed handle recalls Spratling's Alaska letter openers, where Morrill records a silver-bladed opener with a carved handle in the shape of a walrus head, the form strengthened by abstraction (Morrill, p. 66); the eagle opener belongs to the same idea of a worked figural handle on a useful blade.

The letter opener is recorded in Cederwall and Riney's Spratling Silver and in Morrill's Maestros de Plata. A clean original with intact carving and silver detailing, read by its hallmark, is the documented piece.