Rue à Hyères

Painted circa 1912, Rue à Hyères was executed at the apogee of Maurice Utrillo's much celebrated époque blanche. Son of Suzanne Valadon, a painter who also modelled for many Montmartre's artists, such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Utrillo started painting at a young age, encouraged by his family who hoped art would distract the young boy from his drinking habit. Legend has it that his mother would lock him up in a room, away from the wine taverns, and give him postcards of streets and city corners to copy. Much of Utrillo's accomplished work derived from that fortuitous first acquaintance with painting, as he continued throughout his career to paint city landscapes, often derived from photographs.

The linear and symmetrical perspective of Rue à Hyères suggests that the work may have been executed from one of those popular postcards. Although Utrillo was known to painstakingly transfer all the details onto the canvas, the work eschews the objective reality of the photograph. By orchestrating soft tones of whites, greys and light blues, Rue à Hyères transforms the image of this provincial avenue into a geometric abstraction of colours and forms. Not satisfied with the white tones he could achieve using zinc white, during his époque blanche Utrillo used a mix of glue and plaster, which enabled him to faithfully recreate the dusty, luminous white of the houses' walls.