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Our Viúva Lamego mystery, a peek into our backstory of how we research our pieces, and what happens when we hit a wall.
Sometimes when doing research into art pieces, you end up with more questions than answers. And the in the case of this plate is a prime example. Normally, when doing research, we try to find out who the creator is, and discover their story, but in the case of this plate that isn’t possible.
Looking at the plate itself doesn’t offer much in the way of context. We see a single person
standing in an open area. Not exactly much to go on. The details in the background aren’t much either, a single structure surrounded by trees. This structure does appear to have four flags (two pale and two green) adorning it, but that doesn’t offer much. And after a long search through different travel websites, I couldn’t find anything that matched this structure. The bottom of the plate reads “Santarem,” and Santarem is a real place. It is a small city roughly 50 miles north of Lisbon, Portugal.
Thankfully, the back of the plate has a few different marks. The one we’ll be focusing on is the “V.L. Lisboa” makers mark. V.L. doesn’t give us much to go on, but Lisboa does. You might have already guessed what Lisboa is, it’s just the Portuguese spelling and pronunciation of Lisbon the capital of Portugal. Now that we have a city to look narrow the search, we can search for ceramic makers that have the initials V.L. And, as it turns out, there is a company in Lisbon that has the initials V.L., Viúva Lamego.
While we can’t speak of the level of fame V.L. has, we can say that the company has been
around for a while, as their first workshop was built between 1849 and 1865. V.L. started as a
tiling company, they would sell their tiles in Portugal and would ship them across the Atlantic to Brazil. This might seem odd, but Brazil and Portugal have a long history together as Brazil was a Portuguese colonial possession from the 1500s to early 1800s. Though Brazil had been
independent for a few decades by 1849, ties between the two nations were still strong. But it
would be Brazil’s hot and humid climate that led to the desire for quality ceramics. V.L. was one of the many workshops created to fulfill that demand.
Description: A ceramics workshop located in the Largo do Intendente Lisbon, Portugal.
Credit: Viúva Lamego
However, V.L.’s story isn’t about tiles alone. V.L. would gain a reputation for itself by decorating its tiles as a means of publicity, they would start to expand their horizons. Starting in the 1930s, V.L. would start collaborating with ceramic artists outside of V.L.’s workshop. This would lead to V.L. working with a large, and still growing, number of artists creating all kinds of pieces.
Description: A plate designed by Cláudia R. Sampaio and made by Viúva Lamego.
Credit: Cláudia R. Sampaio
Description: A fresco within the Casa Da Musica concert hall.
Credit: Viúva Lamego
A practice that would see artists from across the world give their touch to V.L. pieces. And these pieces would find their way to shops across Portugal, and eventually across the seas to the wider world. Trying to find out the creator of this particular piece was unsuccessful. As the piece isn’t signed, one would have to comb through and compare the works of every artist that V.L. has worked with since the 1930s. Thankfully, V.L. does have a list of artists they have worked with in the past. The problem with that is that by V.L.’s own admission, “Such a rich history, more than a century old, is filled with collaborations with artists. Accordingly, this list will always be both incomplete and outdated.”
So, without knowing the true origin of the plate (where and when it was bought) we can only
speculate as to who our artist is. What was our mysteries artist’s connection to Santarem? Did
they live there. Was it their childhood home, or do they have some other connection? These
and a dozen other questions we just don’t have answers too. Sometimes researching the pieces that come into Contre Le Mur leads to a surprising journey.
Sometimes they are mundane. Sometimes, like now, they only give partial answers, and that
will have to suffice. Or sometimes they need the right person to see a piece at the right time and bring more to the story. Is that person you? What can you share on this piece?
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