Raymond Peynet

Biography of Raymond Peynet

Raymond PEYNET was born on November 16, 1908, in Paris.

He attended the Applied Arts school, located just across from his parents' bistro. They were Auvergnats who had come to settle in Paris a few years earlier.
He then turned to advertising illustration and was hired by Tolmer, where he designed labels for perfumes and candy boxes. Alongside this, he began selling his humorous drawings in Parisian newspapers of the time: Le Rire, Paris Magazine, or The Boulevardier (a newspaper published for British residents in France).

Married since 1930 to Denise D'Amour, a woman with a predestined name for this famous cartoonist of lovers.

It was in 1942, during a trip to Valence, that he got the idea, while waiting seated on a bench in front of a music kiosk, for his famous little musician, a violinist with long hair and a simple, pretty costume.

Over the years, the character would remain unchanged (he would only inherit a companion), and Peynet would experience twenty years of worldwide fame. From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the Lovers became a symbol of a bygone France, of happy and simple love, of grand declarations that rhymed with eternity...

But times change, and after 1968, with sexual liberation and the air of cultural renewal, the Lovers became outdated. A symbol of another era swept away because it also represented a cultural stagnation in which France had been immersed since the end of World War II.

Poor Peynet, the lover-poet who disappeared from the world stage where he had become one of France's most famous representatives... Yet, as fashions always tend to come back to the past, he reappeared in the 1990s, when suddenly we remembered, in a positive way, the 1950s!!

The artist passed away on January 14, 1999, a month to the day before his beloved Valentine's Day, of which he had once again become the natural illustrator. Today, his talent remains celebrated everywhere, with four museums dedicated to him around the world. Peynet has found his place again, with his tender, naive style, his loving gaze on the world...

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES