Sugar Bowl with Silver Handles

A silver sugar bowl with silver handles is Spratling working in pure holloware, the form carried entirely by proportion and the line of its handles rather than by motif or stone. It is a First Design Period piece, from the years after the 1931 founding of the taller.

The reduction of a useful vessel to clean form reflects the design sensibility Morrill identifies across Spratling's objects, forms pared toward their simplest outline (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 73). Worked in the 980 silver he favored for its softer patina (Morrill, p. 36), the bowl reads as quiet, substantial table silver.

It is recorded in Morrill and Berk's Mexican Silver: 20th Century Handwrought Jewelry & Metalwork. Holloware of this kind comes to market less often than Spratling's jewelry.