La Belle Vie

After our little adventure in Bassel, we turned around and headed back to France for our next stop, Colmar. We spent two nights at the Hotel Roi Soleil Prestige which was a another, new and modern hotel. The rooms were so nice and they also had a wonderful breakfast buffet.

Colmar is a another picturesque town, located in the Alsace Region of France. Known for its German influence, one of the most famous people to come from Colmar was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904, the French sculptor best known for designing the Statue of Liberty. There was even a replica of the statue near our hotel!

Born in Colmar, Alsace to Jean Charles Bartholdi (1791-1836) and Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi née Beysser (1801-1891), Bartholdi was the youngest of their four children, and one of only two to survive infancy, along with the oldest brother, Jean-Charles, who became a lawyer and editor. When Bartholdi's father died, his mother moved the family to Paris, while maintaining ownership of their house in Colmar, which later became the Bartholdi Museum. He attended the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and received a BA in 1852. He then went on to study architecture at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts as well as painting under Ary Scheffer in his studio in the Rue Chaptal, now the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Later, Batholdi turned his attention to sculpture, which afterward exclusively occupied him.

Bartholdi served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 as a squadron leader of the National Guard, and as a liaison officer to General Giuseppe Garibaldi, representing the French government and the Army of the Vosges. In 1875, he joined the Freemasons Lodge Alsace-Lorraine in Paris. In 1871, he made his first trip to the United States, to select the site for the Statue of Liberty, the creation of which would occupy him after 1875.

On December 15, 1875, Bartholdi married Jeanne-Emilie Baheux Puysieux in Newport, Rhode Island. They had no children.
Bartholdi was one of the French commissioners in 1876 to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. There he exhibited bronze statues of "The Young Vine-Grower," "Génie Funèbre," "Peace" and "Genius in the Grasp of Misery," for which he received a bronze medal.

Bartholdi, who received the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1886, died of tuberculosis, in Paris, on 4 October 1904.