Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo, born Maurice Valadon, (December 25, 1883 - November 5, 1955) was a French painter.

Born on Christmas Day in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who was actually born there.

The offspring of a liaison between a teen-age model, Marie-Clémentine Valadon, and, so it is thought, a young amateur painter named Boissy. The boy's mother was a clothing-designer and painter's model who posed for Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and as a circus-rider for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Toulouse-Lautrec introduced her -- an artist herself, painting under the name of Suzanne Valadon -- to the great master Edgar Degas, who taught and encouraged her to paint.

Les Tres Moulins de MontmartreMaurice Valadon was only a child when the Spanish writer and art critic, Miguel Utrillo, a friend of his mother's, in a spirit of kindness, bestowed upon him his own name.

With no real training, other than what his mother taught him, he drew and painted what he saw all around him in Montmartre. He presented strange landscapes which delighted the man in the street and astonished the connoisseur. These pictures inspired many artists to re-examine their world and, instead of turning to abstraction, once again to re-create reality.

Critics only took note of him after 1910. By 1920, he had become a legendary figure, internationally known. In 1929, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Today, tourists to the area will find many of his paintings on post cards, one of which is the very popular 1936 painting titled: Montmartre street corner / Lapin Agile. (See:Lapin Agile)

In 1935, at age 52, he married Lucie Valore and moved to Le Vesinet, just outside of Paris.

He died on November 5, 1955, and is buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.

Recent paintings by Utrillo have sold for close to US$1 million.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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