Ball Footed Disc Ashtray

A silver ashtray standing on three ball feet, with rows of five applied discs ranged across three sides, this object carries the workshop's applied-disc vocabulary onto a piece of functional table silver. The repeated discs and ball feet are the same devices Spratling used across his boxes and bracelets, here organizing the rim of a smoking accessory.

Such ashtrays were part of the First Design Period output and were among the affordable objects distributed through Montgomery Ward, this one offered at a modest price in 1943, the years Spratling silver reached a national American audience through the Ward catalogues (Morrill, p. 53).

Recorded in the Morrill and Berk survey, in the 1943 Montgomery Ward Christmas Book, and in Goddard's field guide, the ashtray is a documented example of the small hand-wrought hollowware the workshop made for the home.