Les amoureux de Peynet
Sep. 15th, 2011 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIn 1942, commercial artist Raymond Peynet went to Valence, making a delivery in person, waiting by the bandstand in the park for the person he was meeting. He began sketching the bandstand, with a long-haired young man playing the violin, and pretty young woman listening, enraptured. He drew the rest of the band leaving, and the violinist saying "Don't worry, I'll finish on my own."
Peynet titled the drawing 'The Unfinished Symphony'; it was the magazine editor who called it 'Les Amoureux de Peynet' - Peynet's lovers. They were an immediate success. Throughout the 50s and into the 60s, Peynet carried on drawing the lovers: in the rain, in a boat, on a park bench, flying into the blue sky of a Chagall painting; charming, slightly saccharine, France's image of itself as the country of love and of art.
It's a very marketable self-image: A Google image search finds the lovers on headscarves, petit point patterns, postage stamps, certificates to be given as wedding gifts. Not all of these are period pieces: the official website (scroll down) lists such recent products as perfume, and a wedding dress embroidered with one of Peynet's drawings.
You have to sift through this abundance to find the lovers as I first met them, in the early 60s, as a series of dolls: about the size of Barbie and Ken, but made of some soft plastic or rubber, not jointed but bendable. Postcards show some of the many collectable variants: there were brides and grooms, naturally, there were modern young people and couples in retro swimwear, there were couples in the traditional costumes of the regions of France, or representing the signs of the Zodiac - eBay.fr has a fine selection (though if I were actually buying, I'd probably forget about the dolls and go for the set of fèves, charms for baking in the Twelfth Night galette, for the sheer complexity of its cultural import).
I'd say I hadn't thought about them for years, and that's almost true: but in fact the lovers in Georges Brassens's song Les amoureux des bancs publics, who sit kissing on public benches, always takes on in my mind the appearance of Peynet's lovers. I thought that was just me, but no, it seems, they really were the inspiration for the song:
What brings them into my mind now? Who do we know who's in love, in Paris, and sending dispatches home about it?
Peynet titled the drawing 'The Unfinished Symphony'; it was the magazine editor who called it 'Les Amoureux de Peynet' - Peynet's lovers. They were an immediate success. Throughout the 50s and into the 60s, Peynet carried on drawing the lovers: in the rain, in a boat, on a park bench, flying into the blue sky of a Chagall painting; charming, slightly saccharine, France's image of itself as the country of love and of art.
It's a very marketable self-image: A Google image search finds the lovers on headscarves, petit point patterns, postage stamps, certificates to be given as wedding gifts. Not all of these are period pieces: the official website (scroll down) lists such recent products as perfume, and a wedding dress embroidered with one of Peynet's drawings.
You have to sift through this abundance to find the lovers as I first met them, in the early 60s, as a series of dolls: about the size of Barbie and Ken, but made of some soft plastic or rubber, not jointed but bendable. Postcards show some of the many collectable variants: there were brides and grooms, naturally, there were modern young people and couples in retro swimwear, there were couples in the traditional costumes of the regions of France, or representing the signs of the Zodiac - eBay.fr has a fine selection (though if I were actually buying, I'd probably forget about the dolls and go for the set of fèves, charms for baking in the Twelfth Night galette, for the sheer complexity of its cultural import).
I'd say I hadn't thought about them for years, and that's almost true: but in fact the lovers in Georges Brassens's song Les amoureux des bancs publics, who sit kissing on public benches, always takes on in my mind the appearance of Peynet's lovers. I thought that was just me, but no, it seems, they really were the inspiration for the song:
What brings them into my mind now? Who do we know who's in love, in Paris, and sending dispatches home about it?
