Edme Samson

Pair of Mounted Elephants, c. 1850-1900, Samson, Edmé et Cie, Paris or Montreuil, hard-paste porcelain with overglaze enamels, gilded bronze mounts Edmé Samson (1810, Paris – 1891, Paris) was the founder of the porcelain firm Samson, Edmé et Cie (commonly known as Samson Ceramics) and a famous copyist (and perhaps forger) of porcelain and pottery. The firm produced high-quality copies or imitations of earlier styles of porcelain, mainly 18th-century European and Chinese and Japanese porcelain, but also earlier styles such as Italian maiolica.

Edme Samson's ceramics

Samson began his career by making service and set piece replacements in the late 1830s. In 1845 he opened the ceramics firm Samson, Edmé et Cie at 7, rue de Vendôme (nowadays rue Béranger) in Paris, with the intention of supplying reproductions of ceramics on display in museums and private collections. 18th-century designs from the factories of Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea, Worcester and Derby were among the reproductions Samson, Edmé et Cie produced, among designs copied from the other major European factories. However, many of its products have been passed off as originals.

The Samson firm, in many instances, attempted to distinguish their reproductions from originals. The Samson wares were produced in hard-paste porcelain, while many of the originals would have been produced from soft-paste porcelain. The glazes utilized by the Samson firm were often glossy and somewhat glassy, the modeling stiffer, or wrong in scale, the decoration was often too heavy, and colors were often inaccurate. Leading many experts to conclude that Samson, and his firm, were merely enthusiastic, if sometimes clumsy, copyists. Today many of the Samson’s pieces are collector's items. Ironically not all pieces attributed to Samson are actually Samson: there were many other Paris workshops producing similar 'copies' of earlier ceramics at the same time. Many Samson marks were removed from the piece, leaving just the assumed mark of the piece they had copied; often this is visible as a ground patch to the base. This was done in order to sell the item as the genuine article. Some pieces described as Samson were actually produced by Herend, Hungary.