A royal manufacture in a farming village

Samadet is a small village in the Tursan, the green hill country that rises south of the Adour between Aire-sur-l'Adour and Hagetmau. In the early eighteenth century it had what a faience workshop needs: good local clay, wood for the kilns and a road to the market towns of the Landes and Béarn. The manufacture was founded around 1730 by the abbé de Roquépine and soon received the privileges of a royal manufacture, which protected its trade in the region. The departmental museum in the village gives 1730 as the founding date; the Gascon writer Joseph de Pesquidoux, writing in 1951, gives a working life of 1732 to 1840. Either way, Samadet belongs to the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

Pesquidoux, who lived among this tableware all his life in the Armagnac, calls it the most curious of all the old objects of Gascony. He also gives the end of the story: after 1840 the kilns went cold, and what followed were imitations. That single sentence matters to anyone buying today, because "Samadet" is still used loosely in the trade for any green-bordered faience from the southwest.

Faience is earthenware covered with an opaque white glaze made with tin oxide. The decoration is painted onto the glaze, and the piece is fired again so that the colours fuse into the surface. The result is a white, slightly soft-looking ground with colours that sit just under a glassy skin. If you are new to the material, our overview of French faience and pottery explains how it differs from stoneware and porcelain.

The style: Louis XV, green and full of birds

Pesquidoux describes the Samadet style simply as Louis XV, and the shapes bear that out: plates and dishes with gently lobed or contoured rims, oval platters, deep bowls, fruit stands and cruet sets with the curves of the mid-eighteenth century. The decoration is where the ware becomes recognisably Gascon.

The everyday service: green borders and grounds

The bulk of a service, the plates and dishes used at every meal, was decorated in green, on the rims and on the grounds. Within that green, the painters drew from the countryside around them:

• foliage and wild herbs, loosely brushed;
• trees and branches on which a bird is perched, most often the palombe, the wood pigeon whose autumn migration over the Landes is still an event;
• bouquets of roses and carnations, both common in Gascon gardens;
• occasionally forget-me-nots, and more rarely tulips, a borrowing from Dutch models.

The museum at Samadet lists the same vocabulary in its collection: flowers, butterflies, roses, wood pigeons, human figures and animals.

Figures and fantasies

Some pieces carry figures rather than flowers. Pesquidoux mentions a hunter lying in wait, a galloping horseman, odd disjointed characters in the manner of the engraver Jacques Callot, and Chinese figures in round, pointed hats. These chinoiseries follow the European taste of the period for imagined Asian scenes; our encyclopedia entry on chinoiserie traces where that fashion came from.

The great pieces: polychrome and sculpted

The large showpieces were painted in full polychrome, and several were modelled in relief. Pesquidoux describes three that are worth knowing by sight:

1. The cruet set (huilier), with a rearing stallion between the oil and vinegar bottles, ridden by an impassive horseman. The museum at Samadet presents an oil and vinegar cruet with a rearing horse as one of the highlights of its collection.
2. Salt cellars in which a seated Venus, streaming with water, is flanked by small salt wells, with a very young Cupid at her feet.
3. Fruit bowls with wide, uneven, pierced rims (à jour), painted with an isard, the Pyrenean chamois, hesitating on a rock.

These are museum pieces. They rarely come to market, and when something of this kind does appear, the attribution needs to be argued in writing by a specialist.

How a Samadet service was used

Pesquidoux gives the size of an ordinary Samadet service: 120 plates and 50 dishes. The figure makes sense once you picture an eighteenth-century meal in a Gascon country house, served in successive waves of four or five entrées, as many cold dishes in aspic, as many roasts and some vegetables, before the blancmanges, cheeses and fruit. Every wave needed its own dishes and every guest a clean plate. The local gentry bought complete services; the strong wines of the region went into fine, ringing glass.

The ware also travelled down the social scale. In peasant households, Pesquidoux records, the bride's godfather gave her a few Samadet plates and dishes on her wedding day so that she could decorate her room with them. It was an envied present. That custom explains why single plates and odd dishes turn up in farmhouses far from any château: they were hung or stood on display, not used daily. For how those display pieces sat in the bedroom alongside the bride's armoire, see our article on the Gascon wedding armoire.

What an unmarked ware means for buyers

Pesquidoux puts it in one phrase: the mark of Samadet is to have none. Most pieces carry no factory mark on the back. If a plate offered as Samadet does carry a mark or painted letters, treat it as a clue to be checked against documented pieces, not as proof.

Without a mark, an attribution rests on several things read together:

• Decoration: the green palette of the everyday service and the regional motifs described above, painted with a quick, assured brush rather than a hesitant copy.
• Shape: rims and profiles of the Louis XV type, consistent with the date.
• Body and glaze: an earthenware body under a white tin glaze, with the wear you would expect from use: knife marks in the well, rubbing on the rim and on the foot.
• Comparison: a close match with documented pieces, ideally the collection at the museum in Samadet itself, which shows about three hundred pieces.

Several other faience centres in the southwest of France worked in related styles in the same century, and nineteenth-century and later workshops made green-bordered "Samadet-type" wares. A dealer who writes "Samadet" without qualification is making a claim; "attributed to Samadet" or "southwest France, Samadet type" are more honest descriptions when the evidence is partial. Price follows the wording.

Condition checks for old faience

Tin glaze is brittle. On any eighteenth-century plate, expect some losses, and look closely at the following:

1. Rim chips (égrenures): small flakes of glaze along the edge, showing the buff or pinkish body. Normal on used tableware; they reduce value but are not a sign of a fake.
2. Cracks: hold the plate up and tap it lightly with a fingernail. A clear ring suggests a sound body; a dull note suggests a crack, sometimes hidden under restoration.
3. Restoration: old faience is often filled and overpainted. Look under raking light and with ultraviolet if you can; restored areas often appear flatter, glossier or a different white.
4. Later decoration (surdécor): plain old blanks were sometimes painted later to increase their value. Paint that sits on top of the glaze rather than in it, or colours that are too fresh, are warning signs.
5. Hanging holes: two small holes drilled in the foot ring show that the plate was hung on a wall, as the wedding custom suggests. They are part of the story.

For displaying, use plate hangers with padded claws that fit the rim, or a plate rack on a dresser. Never use a dishwasher, and avoid soaking: crazed glaze lets water into the porous body, which can then stain. Our antique French plates entry covers display and storage in more detail.

Seeing Samadet in the Landes

The Musée départemental de la Faïence et des Arts de la table stands on the road to Hagetmau at Samadet, about 35 km (22 miles) south of Mont-de-Marsan. It presents the history and techniques of the manufacture, about three hundred pieces of Samadet faience and a room of period table settings. Check the opening days before you travel. If you are planning a buying trip in the region, our guide to antique shopping in France explains how brocantes and dealers' fairs are organised.