(b Paris, 26 Dec 1883; d Dax, 5 Nov 1955). French painter, son of SUZANNE VALADON. He was entrusted to his grandmother while his mother posed as a model for such painters as Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes before discovering her own talent for drawing and painting. His father, the Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo (1862–1934), only admitted paternity eight years after Maurice’s birth. Maurice Utrillo had no predisposition for art, but when he was 19 his mother took medical advice and urged him to adopt drawing and painting as a distraction from his need for alcohol. In search of a suitable subject, he went to the countryside around Montmagny, a village to the north of Paris, where, between the autumn of 1903 and the winter of 1904, he completed almost 150 paintings, sombre, heavily impasted landscapes, such as the Roofs of Montmagny (Paris, Pompidou). By 1906 the doctor felt that Utrillo could return to Montmartre. His pictures of the streets and suburbs were painted with a less heavy impasto and with lighter tones. He was attracted by ordinary houses, as in the Rue du Mont-Cenis (see fig.) and Berlioz’s House (both 1914; Paris, Mus. Orangerie), and suburban churches, for instance the Church of Villiers-le-Bel (1909; priv. col., see Pétridès, i, p. 129). These themes, associated with painters such as Daumier, Pissarro and Caillebotte, became Utrillo’s chief source of inspiration, but he soon turned to a more ambitious subject, cathedrals. He was concerned with the development of an ordered composition and a flattened treatment of space that suggested the artificial appearance of a theatre set, as in Notre-Dame (1909; Paris, Mus. Orangerie). Particularly during World War I he also found that such subjects allowed him to project strong emotions, as in Rheims Cathedral in Flames (1914; Basle, priv. col., see Pétridès, i, p. 67).