Dominican Convent

For five centuries Martin Schongauer's Madonna of the Rose Bower stood in Saint Martin's, the big collegiate church in the centre of Colmar, for which he painted it in 1473. On 11 January 1972 it was stolen. It turned up in June 1973 at Décines, near Lyon, and when it came back it was given a new home in the choir of the former Dominican church, where it has stayed ever since.

The Madonna is life-size and dressed in red, seated in an enclosed garden with roses climbing a trellis behind her and finches among the leaves. The panel was cut down on every side at some unknown date, so it now stands about 2 metres high where it once measured around 2.5. Its Gothic Revival frame is a later addition by the sculptor Jacques Alfred Klem.

The church around it belonged to the Dominican friars. Rudolf of Habsburg, the German king, laid the first stone of its tall choir in 1283, and the old convent buildings beside it now house a library. Schongauer, Colmar's own painter and engraver, worked for this house too, and the large altarpiece he and his workshop painted for the Dominicans around 1480 is now a few streets away in the Unterlinden Museum.