Raymond Peynet Collection

“He did everything that could be done with a pencil.” This is what his daughter and granddaughter like to repeat during our meetings, allowing us to share through their memories a daily life filled with skill and boundless creativity.

By allowing us to discover Peynet's protean work, his family reopens the doors to his universe.

When we think Raymond Peynet, we immediately picture his famous lovers, their bandstand, Paris, the flowery world that surrounds them, and the iconic dolls made in their likeness. We are instantly transported to a romantically bygone France. It was in the 1940s, while waiting for a date in front of a bandstand in Valence, that he imagined a little violinist and his admirer. Published under the title " Peynet's Lovers," these characters, who would become his emblematic figures, were born and would earn him an enduring legacy. For several years now, no fewer than four museums have paid tribute to him: in Antibes, Brassac-les-Mines, and also in Japan at Karuizawa (Nagano) and Sakuto-cho (Okayama), where his work, so representative of love and France, has garnered great enthusiasm.

While continuing to make his loving couple known throughout the world, he will continue to work for the press, but also create costumes and theater sets, film posters, jewelry, record covers and even silk squares on our Lyon lands! ... by simultaneously distributing, with great success, dolls bearing the likeness of his lovers.

The work of this prolific artist is also full of humor and even tinged with a facetious eroticism to which is added a tender poetry which allows it to remain timeless.

It is this aspect that particularly appealed to us since we are always keen to combine past and present, tradition and contemporaneity and to perpetuate the memory of emblematic artists.

We have chosen and edited, in concert with the Peynet family, a selection of drawings made between the 50s and 60s and created new compositions and colorings.

Three models have emerged:

The first, Peynet's Dolls, is guided by the delicacy and poetry of the original preparatory pencil drawings. We composed and colored the whole thing, then recreated the pastel and powdery colors in watercolor.

The second, Le Bois d'Amour, celebrates nature, which often hosts the universe of lovers, and depicts moments of complicity between the two lovers in several colors, giving the whole a deceptively uniform look.

Finally, Peynet's Lovers takes us into the delightfully romantic wake of the famous couple's rendezvous and reconnects with the retro spirit of Toile de Jouy.