“On a particularly boring day, I had a clever but unfortunate inspiration. I seized a piece of cardboard, some tubes of tint... and, confronting a typical Montmartre street corner, I suddenly found myself a practitioner of this difficult and thankless art of painting.” M. Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo ( 26 December 1883 – 5 November 1955), was a French painter who specialized in cityscapes. Born in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who were born there.

Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo

When a mental illness took hold of the 21-year-old Utrillo in 1904, his mother encouraged him to take up painting. 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 Utrillo was internationally acclaimed. In 1928, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Légion d'honneur. Throughout his life, however, he was interned in mental asylums repeatedly.

In middle age Utrillo was too ill to work in the open air and painted landscapes viewed from windows, from postcards, and from memory.

Today, tourists to the area will find many of his paintings on postcards, one of which is his very popular 1936 painting entitled Montmartre Street Corner or Lapin Agile.

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