Franklin Porter Sterling Silver Arts & Crafts Serving Spoon, Danvers, MA, 1925-35

This serving spoon was made by Franklin Porter whose silver was always made of great design and heavy gauge. It has a round bowl soldered onto a handle with a rounded top. Most unusual is the join of the handle and bowl on the back. It is executed in the form of a bird foot. One usually finds most Arts & Crafts flatware undecorated and relying on its form and hammered surface for its artistic expression. This added ornament may easily have been a request of the customer. The back of the handle is monogrammed 'H*M' under a 'W'. 

Franklin Porter (1869-1935) was an important arts & crafts silversmith working in Danvers, Massachusetts when this bowl was made. Porter trained at the Rhode Island School of Design.(1) However, he was fiercely independent and never joined Boston's Society of Arts & Crafts, eschewing the commercial pressures of that organization.(2)

This beautiful spoon is marked 'F. PORTER/ STERLING' and with Franklin Porter's trademark first used in 1925. It measures 6.25 inches long, weighs 1.50 troy ounces and is in excellent antique condition.

Endnotes:

1. Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward, eds., Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000: American Silver in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (Boston: MFA Publications, 2008), pp. 359-360.
2. "Franklin Porter, Silversmith" by Helen Porter Philbrick in the Essex Institute Historical Collections (Vol. CV, No. 3, July, 1969), p. 211.