By Isla Quinn
Cobalt blue. White. That is the look people name when they name Sargadelos, and Wikipedia confirms it: cobalt blue and white is the combination the pottery became known for. The pottery comes from Galicia, in the north-west of Spain. Its story has two beginnings and one long gap, and the sources do not agree on the dates.
First beginning
Wikipedia says the factory opened in 1806, founded by Antonio Raimundo Ibáñez, who lived from 1749 to 1809. Monocle, a magazine, tells it a little differently. It says the iron works came first, in 1788, and that a ceramics plant followed in 1804, which it calls the first of its kind in Spain. Those are two different years for the same event, 1806 and 1804, and we show both.
What was made? Wikipedia says early production was fine earthenware with a lead glaze, fired at between 1,100 and 1,200 degrees Celsius. Those are Wikipedia’s figures, and we leave them as stated. It is a technical description of a ceramic that is not porcelain, and it is the nearest thing in our sources to a recipe.
The end of the first factory
Ibáñez died in 1809. Monocle says he was killed that year by a mob. We give that as Monocle’s account and do not add to it. Wikipedia says the Marquis, as it styles the successor, was in charge in 1808, and that the factory closed definitively in 1875. In 1849, Wikipedia says, it supported over a thousand families and ran four kilns. That is the largest scale either source gives for the first works.
Second beginning
Then the gap. The sources give several different dates for the revival. Monocle says it came back in 1947 as a cooperative. Wikipedia mentions a DĂaz Pardo workshop in 1949. Wikipedia’s other date is 1964 for the Laboratorio de Formas, the design laboratory, while Monocle says 1963. So the revival is 1947, 1949, 1963 or 1964, depending on which sentence you read. Our reading: these are separate events, a cooperative first, a workshop next, a design lab after that, and the sources are each describing a different one of them. That is our inference, not theirs.
The last building the sources name is the circular factory in Cervo, dated 1970 by both Wikipedia and Monocle. It is the one date they share.
What the sources do and do not say
Wikipedia mentions cobalt blue and white. Monocle does not mention blue and white at all. So the colour pairing that most people associate with the name rests on one source. That is a thin base for the best-known fact about the pottery, and we say so plainly.
We have not given employee numbers, turnover or prices for any date, since the sources were uneven and some figures were company claims.
Dates in order
- 1749: birth of Antonio Raimundo Ibáñez, according to Wikipedia.
- 1788: iron works, according to Monocle.
- 1804: ceramics plant, according to Monocle.
- 1806: factory opened, according to Wikipedia.
- 1808: the Marquis in charge, according to Wikipedia.
- 1809: Ibáñez dies; Monocle says he was killed by a mob.
- 1849: over a thousand families and four kilns, according to Wikipedia.
- 1875: closed definitively, according to Wikipedia.
- 1947: revival as a cooperative, according to Monocle.
- 1949: DĂaz Pardo workshop, according to Wikipedia.
- 1963: Laboratorio de Formas, according to Monocle.
- 1964: Laboratorio de Formas, according to Wikipedia.
- 1970: circular factory at Cervo, according to both.
Side by side
Where Wikipedia and Monocle overlap, they mostly agree on the shape of the story: a founding, a collapse and a revival. Where they differ, they differ by a year or two in the founding and by more in the revival. The founding gap is 1804 against 1806. The design lab gap is 1963 against 1964. These look like small differences, but they are the sort that a careful buyer should know exist.
What kind of sources these are
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia anyone can edit. Monocle is a lifestyle magazine, and its piece dates from 2007. Neither is the company’s own archive, and we have not used the company’s own site. Anyone writing a label or a description for a Sargadelos piece should take the date from the maker’s own documentation.
Questions a buyer would ask
A piece sold under this name raises plain questions, and none of them can be answered from the two sources we read. Which of the revival dates does the maker itself use? Is a given dish from the cooperative era, the design-laboratory era or the present? Is it earthenware with a lead glaze, as Wikipedia says the early production was, or something else now? We have not found a source for the current glaze, so we do not say. Anyone listing such a piece should ask the maker for its own dates in writing and keep them with the item.
Why the two beginnings matter
A reader may wonder why we dwell on a year or two. The reason is that the story has a gap of roughly seventy years between the closure Wikipedia dates to 1875 and the revival Monocle dates to 1947. Our reading: between those two years the sources describe no works at Sargadelos in the form that earlier owners had run. A label that says “since 1806” would be a claim about a name and a place, and a label that says “since 1947” would be a claim about a working cooperative. Both can be defended. They are not the same claim.
What we left out
We left out the later history of the cooperative, the names of the designers who followed, and anything about the product range today. We left out every price. A piece about what a curator would actually list, in terms of shapes and sizes, would need a source we have not yet read.
Roam first. Shop later.