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Lot Essay
The artist and model Suzanne Valadon taught her son Maurice Utrillo to paint by having him copy postcards of Montmartre. After six years of hard work and little reward the young artist had his first success. In 1909, the year in which the present painting was done, three of his landscapes were included in the Salon d'Automne. The writer and art dealer Louis Libaude purchased several of his paintings. Utrillo had developed a style of his own, his manière blanche, in which he employed bleached tonalities, rigorous perspective and an uncanny firmness of construction to depict the lower class neighborhoods of Paris. The curiously detached and unsentimental manner of Utrillo's "White Period" presaged the urban melancholy and alienation seen in Giorgio de Chirico's desolate piazzas.
The secretive and self-effacing qualities in these paintings stemmed from the artist's own dysfunctional personality. He was a hopeless alcoholic, almost pathologically shy, and often behaved badly in public. He was averse to painting outdoors while people looked on, so he worked in the seclusion of his rooms, relying on memory and his stacks of postcards. He was compulsive and perfectionistic in his odd way. Roland Dorgelès recounted how "His production never seemed faithful enough for him...To render color, he crushed his tubes of paint and went into a rage when he couldn't find the right one. 'They're not in silver-white, the facades, are they? Not in zinc white...They are made of plaster...' He absolutely needed to obtain the exact same chalky white" (quoted in D. Franck, Bohemian Paris, New York, 2001, p. 10).
The secretive and self-effacing qualities in these paintings stemmed from the artist's own dysfunctional personality. He was a hopeless alcoholic, almost pathologically shy, and often behaved badly in public. He was averse to painting outdoors while people looked on, so he worked in the seclusion of his rooms, relying on memory and his stacks of postcards. He was compulsive and perfectionistic in his odd way. Roland Dorgelès recounted how "His production never seemed faithful enough for him...To render color, he crushed his tubes of paint and went into a rage when he couldn't find the right one. 'They're not in silver-white, the facades, are they? Not in zinc white...They are made of plaster...' He absolutely needed to obtain the exact same chalky white" (quoted in D. Franck, Bohemian Paris, New York, 2001, p. 10).