Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Maurice Utrillo was a French painter who specialised in cityscapes. Born in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who were born there.

Utrillo was the son of the artist Suzanne Valadon, who was then an eighteen-year-old artist's model. She never revealed who had been the father of her child. Valadon found that posing for Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec provided her with an opportunity to study their techniques. She taught herself to paint, and when Toulouse-Lautrec introduced her to Edgar Degas, he became her mentor. Eventually she became a peer of the artists she had posed for.

Meanwhile, her mother was left in charge of raising the young Maurice, who soon showed a troubling inclination toward truancy and alcoholism. When a mental illness took hold of the 21-year-old Utrillo in 1904, he was encouraged to paint by his mother. He soon showed real artistic talent. With no training beyond what his mother taught him, he drew and painted what he saw in Montmartre. After 1910 his work attracted critical attention, and by 1920 he was internationally acclaimed. In 1928, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Légion d'honneur.

Although his life also was plagued by alcoholism, he lived into his seventies. Maurice Utrillo died on 5 November 1955, and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.

In 2010, several retrospective exhibitions were staged, at Oglethorpe University Museum of Art and in Montmartre, Paris, that culminated in an auction of 30 of Utrillo's works on 30 November 2010 from the collection of Paul Pétridès, Utrillo's art dealer. This follows the 2009 exhibition of Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo's works held in Paris in 2009.