Lasts days in charming Colmar

Colmar has two favourite sons known world wide, Hansi and Frederic Auguste Batholdi 1834 – 1904).

Hansi, or Jean-Jacques Waltz (1873-1951), was an Alsatian artist. He was a staunch pro-French activist, and is famous for his cute drawings, some of which contain harsh critiques of the Germans of the time. He was also a French hero of both the World Wars. His cards, postcards and paintings are sold everywhere, but none of his anti German ones we noticed!

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) has his sculptures all over town. He had a passion for freedom and liberty. This one in our square is called the Fontaine Roesselmann, after a provost who died defending the freedom of Colmar in 1262.

 

There is an interesting Museum about him, situated in the house in which he was born, because not only is he a famous sculptor, painter and photographer in France, he is also the designer of the Statue of Liberty.

Here is the great man himself leaning on the Statue of Liberty. The statue was a gift to America from France.

 

Inside his house, plates artistically decorate the ceiling.

 

A rather small copy of the lady herself adorns a roundabout. It was built to celebrate the centenary of Bartholdi's death.

 

Colmar has a magnificent museum called the Unterlinden which is set around the Gothic style cloisters of a former 1232 Dominican convent. The nuns here, as was common practise, produced excellent wine and used the profits to care for Colmar's poor.

 

It snows a lot here in winter so this sled would have been put to good use.

 

Plenty of locks on this chest.

 

A glass harmonica.

 

A very typical Alsation wardrobe.

 

There are many fine works of art in this museum but their most famous, the magnificent Isenheim Alterpiece by painter Matthais Grunewald and sculptor Nicholas Huguenau, is actually in the Dominican Church at the moment. It is a series of 24 panels on hinges that open and shut and was designed to comfort patients in a medieval hospital who were enduring the pain of ergotism, fungal poisoning from spoiled grain.

 

The Annunciation panel.

 

This panel is very lovely.

 

he Virgin and the Rosebush 1473, by Martin Schongauer is another famous painting in the Dominican Church.

 

A richly decorated 1537 merchants house, Maison Pfister, with it's oriel windows.

 

The Franciscan church, Saint Matthieu with a mosaic tiled roof.

 

Love the store signs in Colmar - a charcuterie (or butcher), so pork, foie grass (geese), hanging from a chook.

This house is a Tour de France fan.

 

A draper holding a bar to measure his material.

 

This window at the railway station was the last thing we saw when we left Colmar for Strasbourg. It depicts two local maidens about to be run down by a train before being rescued by an artist.