Colmar Museums and Wine

Our second day in Colmar we woke later than we had intended and got down to breakfast around nine.  We were staying at a B&B called Chez Leslie, run by an American who is married to a Frenchman.  Leslie is a very helpful host and runs a very pleasant place.  Our room, large, sunny, with wooden floors and a view over the back garden, was the "Shoe Room," decorated with shoe-related art.  Breakfast was continental-style: croissants and other pastries, fruit, yogurt (not skyr), orange juice, coffee and tea.  There was an older couple who had driven there from northern England and a younger couple who were from Toronto.

Chez Leslie is a great place, but you should expect to do a lot of walking if you stay there.  It is a five-minute walk from the train station, but in the opposite direction from the old town, which is a good fifteen-minute walk from the station.

After breakfast, we went to the old town, passing a renaissance mansion called "the House of Heads" because of all the grimacing heads sculpted on the facade, and finally arriving at the Unterlinden Museum, a medieval monastery dissolved during the French Revolution.  This would be a minor, somewhat quirky regional museum of arts and crafts (including an assortment of stoves that are covered with ceramic tiles), except for one major masterpiece, Mathias Grunewald's Issenheim altarpiece, the making of which is the subject of Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Mahler.

This huge and complicated collection of paintings, with associated sculptures, was painted between 1512 and 1516 for the chapel of an abbey and hospital (for sufferers from ergotism, a serious illness caused by parasites in grain) in Issenheim in Alsace.  Parts of the altarpiece are designed to fold in and out showing the various paintings and the sculptures behind them.  They are now divided up into their constituent parts, to allow them all to be displayed in what must have been the Unterlinden monastery chapel.

The main painting is a massive, deeply emotional crucifixion, that was shown to the patients to allow them to meditate on how Christ was also a sufferer, for them.  But other scenes show his triumphant resurrection, as well as a joyful angelic orchestra serenading his birth.  Several panels show scenes from the life of the patron saint of the order at Issenheim, St. Anthony Abbot, including him being attacked by a horde of demons.

After lunch at a very nice tea room, Jadis et Gourmande (Mary Joy had a very good fennel and zucchini quiche, with salad, while I had a tarte flambee--a sort of thin crust pizza with cream instead of cheese and onion slices and bacon bits), we went to the Dominican church, now a museum, to see native Colmarian Martin Schongauer's painting "Madonna of the Thorn Bush" (1473).  Photography there was forbidden, so I can't show you a picture here, and you'll have to take our word for it that this is a truly wonderful painting.  The virgin's face is so kind and sad as she faces the future of her innocent son.  Behind her is a rose bush full of flowers and different kinds of birds.

We went to the Martin Jund winery, in the old town, and did a tasting, then bought two bottles of a very good rieslings and one of a cremant (in Europe, the only wine that is allowed to be called "champagne" is wine from the Champagne region of France).  Two of the bottles would be gifts, one of the rieslings would be for us.

After coffee and pastries at Jadis et Gourmand, we went back to our room for a nap.  We went out again after eight, looking for a light dinner.  We stumbled onto a winstub (a kind of wine bar, but without the pretentiousness that that would imply in America) that Leslie had mentioned, called La Soi.  This is a small, restaurant with a couple of tables outside, a couple at the front and a few along the side opposite the bar, at which a number of people, apparently locals, were eating.   The wife was the chef, the husband poured wine and the young boy sat at the counter coloring until we came in, whereupon he ran to get Maman.  We weren't all that hungry, so we each ordered a chicken salad.  It was wonderful, with much more chicken meat than in an American salad, pan-fried, I think, in a butter and riesling sauce, along with sliced mushrooms, fresh lettuce and tomatoes.  Mary Joy was ecstatic.

Someone had bought a large bottle of cremant, and the owner came around and offered us each a glass.   The people at the front of the restaurant were laughing and joking with the owner and his wife.  As we were leaving, we talked with some of them.  When they found out that we were American, they laughed, because the owner had apparently thought that we were English.  One of them had just been to New York,which he had liked very much.  They approved of our going to hear the opera at the Roman arena in Verona, but said that we would need to bring cushions.  Then to bed.