Marie-Madaleine Gauthier

`Mimi’ Coste, the daughter of a wine merchant, was born in Langon in the Gironde, on 25 April 1920. She studied at the university of Bordeaux from 1937-43, became a librarian and was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Municipal at Limoges in 1948, the year after she married a fellow bibliophile, Serge Gauthier. Both were to have distinguished careers, though their professional paths subsequently diverged. Serge went on to become librarian of the Pompidou Centre; Madame Gauthier earned an international reputation as an authority on medieval enamels. The subject first caught her interest while working in the library at Limoges and it was the 164 graphic entries she wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition, Emaux limousins des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe siècles, held at the Limoges Musée municipal in 1948, that set her feet on the ladder to academic recognition. From this exhibition grew the ambitious Emaux méridionaux: catalogue international de l’oeuvre de Limoges, sponsored by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, on which Madame Gauthier was still working when she died. Among the scholars who visited the exhibition was Charles Oman, Keeper of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum. So impressed was he by Madame Gauthier and her plans for the corpus, that he offered photographs for it from his museum’s archives, the first of many such contributions. Of the originally projected five volumes, the first, describing in detail more than 330 Romanesque enamels, was published in 1987 to critical acclaim. The entries were organized according to a new system, aimed at facilitating comparison with any other object of similar type. The information was arranged in simple categories: materials and construction; technique; the colours and their distribution; subject matter and, finally, style.Volume II, covering enamels up to the middle of the thirteenth century, is ready for the press and a further volume, Les Châsses historiées à programme hagiographique is in active preparation by researchers chosen by Madame Gauthier. In 1962 she resigned from her librarian’s post in Limoges and in the following year moved to Paris as Conservateur de Classe Exceptionelle at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where she remained until retirement. Naturally, her links with Limoges remained strong: she had been elected president of the Société Archéologique et Historique du Limousin in 1957 and she directed excavations in the city at the Sépulcre de Saint Martial for five seasons between 1960-4. Her presidency was finally relinquished in 1967, when she was elected Honorary President. She taught the decorative arts of the Middle Ages at the Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne) for many years from 1971, and lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1964 and 1967. In 1972 Madame Gauthier published Emaux du Moyen Age Occidental, the first major publication since the mid-nineteenth century to attempt a survey of all techniques of medieval enamelling. Her enthusiasm for her subject and her insatiable curiosity about it extended beyond the objects themselves and the techniques of their production to the lives of the craftsmen, their clients, especially the clergy, and their collectors. Many Limoges enamels found their way to Britain from the time of their manufacture, though there was no serious attempt to place them in their art historical context until the seventeenth century. Madame Gauthier studied the work of Richard Gough, FSA, Director 1771-97, a knowledgeable historian of medieval metalwork responsible for the attribution to Limoges of a number of enamels exhibited by Fellows at meetings of the Society; and of Albert Way, FSA, Director 1842-6, who knew the English collections well and studied the graphic and textual sources for medieval enamels. Francis Wormald, FSA, President 1965-70, was an early influence on Madame Gauthier’s work and a lifelong friend. She visited Burlington House during the exhibition of fifty masterpieces from the Keir Collection at the British Museum in 1981-2, for which her catalogue, jointly with Geneviève François, was translated into English by Neil Stratford, FSA. Her crowning glory was the great double exhibition of Limoges enamels at the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1995/6 – a far cry from her first seminal display in the local museum in 1948. It would have pleased her, as one of the Antiquaries’ most eminent Honorary Fellows, and the generous friend of many British scholars, to know that the Society’s Limoges châsse, bought for a song in Naples by Sir William Hamilton, FSA, and donated by him to the Society in 1801, was displayed at the same Musée municipal from June-September 1999 in the exhibition Valérie et Thomas Becket: De l’influence des princes Plantagenêt dans l’Oeuvre de Limoges. Madame Gauthier died suddenly at her home in Langon on 20 May 1998.