Half Youthful and Half Animal

Imagine it's the age of flower children and free love—in France, in 1967. Imagine a thoughtful man of 69, an age when many folk are starting to turn out the lights upstairs, strolling through the small town where he was born and coming across a young woman dozing, semi-nude, on the bank of a river. She is at peace with herself and the world.

What does this man do? Pull out a camera, with it's one-eyed 1/30th of a second stare? No, he pulls out his brushes and watercolors and creates a spontaneous study of her innocent bliss.

André Planson — Sleeping Girl on the Banks of the Marne — 1967

Such was André Planson, the French artist, born in 1898 in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a small town on the Marne River. To quote from an online source:

". . . the profound ties to his native land was what really counted in Planson's life. He always returned to the small town of Ferté and its surroundings where he painted deftly and untiringly the corn fields and the windings of the Marne River with the fishermen, the boatsmen, the restaurants full of shapely pretty girls whose sinuous figures, half youthful and half animal, are in accord with the curves of the foliage and the reflections of the light".

Oh, as I grow older to be such an age, I pray that I be in such a place, such a situation, such a state of mind and ability.