"Tang" - Another Mystery
Piece
to the Puzzle of Early Lladró
-Peggy Whiteneck
Some months ago, collector Larry Gochberg contacted me to ask about an
item that looked like Lladró but was not marked. Upon sending
a picture of it to the Lladró company, he'd received an email from a
Lladró representative informing him that the bulldog figurine in question had been made
by a company called Tang "that was purchased by the Lladró brothers at the
beginning of the 60s together with another factory called Zaphir."
A small (5" long) bulldog model identified by a
Lladró company staffer as having been a Tang model, a company later acquired by
Lladró. (Photo courtesy of Larry Gochberg.)
Well, at first, I found the claim hard to believe. I've seen no evidence that the Zaphir
brand dates earlier than 1978, and it was in production as a distinct company
at least through the early 1980s, so Lladró's buy-out of Zaphir couldn't
have been contemporaneneous with a 1960s acquisition of a
brand called Tang. The Lladró source also told Mr. Gochberg that the bulldog model was still in production
as a NAO, although that's clearly not the case. Besides, I considered "Tang" a pretty odd name for a porcelain produced in
Spain; if you do an internet search on the name, what you'll get are
thousands of references to ancient Tang Dynasty Chinese porcelain.
Then, just recently, collector Richard Voinnet of Paris, France contacted
me via email to ask about an item that had been attached to a
wooden base and that he'd bought on the secondary market because he'd been sure it was a Lladró. When he got the item home
and removed the artificially attached base, he was disappointed to see the
item had a mark that wasn't Lladró's. "Can you identify the mark from the picture
I'm sending?" he asked.
Lo and behold, there was the elusive "Tang" mark! Moreover, it was attached
to a model of an adolescent boy wearing a yarmulke and accompanied by
his dog, an item I knew had been made as an early NAO (#32,
"Man's Best Friend") and which dates from no later than the early 1970s and perhaps
as early as the mid- to late-1960s (see NAO catalog listing for this item).
This Tang model was also made as NAO #32, "Man's
Best Friend." Its early NAO catalog number dates that version from no
later than the early 70s. According to a Lladró source, the Tang
company was acquired by Lladró, so there is a demonstrable relationship
between the two brands, though the precise nature of that relationship -
and which company came first - remains obscure. (Photo courtesy of Richard Voinnet.)
Let's stop for a moment and ponder
this: the NAO model of this was already being made this early. So if
Lladró acquired Tang, the latter
was already working - that early - in the style that Lladró
popularized. How do we explain this? Well - and here I am engaging
in my own conjecture, though it is logically
consistent with what else we know about the migrations of Lladró
sculptors between brands and companies - we already know that Fulgencio García, Juan
Huerta, and Vicente Martinez (all early Lladró core collection
sculptors) also worked on some of the earliest NAO models, so it's at
least possible one or more of them worked on Tang as well.
A nice, clear image of the base of Richard Voinnet's
figurine grouping, showing the well-impressed Tang mark. (Photo
courtesy of Richard Voinnet.)
Lladró has always been scrupulously careful of its reputation
and has never been known to claim relationships to other products unless
such relationships actually existed. Thus, the fascinating information we can take from the Lladró staffer's
response to Mr. Gochberg is that, the Asian name notwithstanding, it does, indeed, appear that
there was a Spain-based porcelain figurine company named "Tang" and that
it had some connection to the early history of NAO by Lladró, even if
precisely what that connection was and how it evolved remain unclear.
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