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 made of skill and all-round creativity.
By allowing us to discover Peynet's protean work, his family reopens the doors to his universe.
When we talk about Raymond Peynet , we immediately think of his famous couple of lovers, their kiosk, Paris, the flowery world that surrounds them and the famous dolls bearing their likeness. We are instantly plunged into the past of a romantically outdated France. It was in the 1940s, while waiting for a meeting in front of a music kiosk in Valencia, that he imagined a little violinist and his admirer. Published under the title Peynet's Lovers , those who would become his emblematic characters were born and would earn him a hitherto undeniable legacy. For several years now, no less than four museums have paid tribute to him: in Antibes, Brassac les Mines but also in Japan Karuizawa (Nagano) and Sakuto-cho (Okayama) where his work, so representative of Love and France, meets a 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, Les Poupées de Peynet , is guided by the delicacy and poetry of the original preparatory pencil drawings. We composed and colored everything, then recreated the pastel and powdery colors in watercolor.
The second, Le Bois d'Amour, highlights nature which often welcomes the world of Lovers and presents moments of complicity between the two lovers, in several colors, giving the whole an air of faux-plain.
Finally, Les Amoureux de Peynet takes us in the deliciously romantic wake of the famous couple's meetings and reconnects with the retro spirit of the toile de Jouy.