Utrillo, Maurice Biography

French Impressionist artist Maurice was a painter, noted especially for his oil paintings of the houses and streets of the Montmartre district of Paris. He was the illegitimate son of the model and artist Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938). His father was not known, and he was given a name by a Spanish art critic, Miguel Utrillo. The young Utrillo had no instruction as an artist apart from that given by his mother, who herself was untutored. When, as an adolescent, he became an alcoholic, his mother encouraged him to take up oil painting as therapy. Despite his frequent relapses into alcoholism, painting became Utrillo's obsession, and he produced thousands of oils, as well as a few drawings and lithographs. In 1924, to keep her son permanently away from the bars of Montmartre, Valadon moved with him to a chateau near Lyon.

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