La Cathédrale de Chartres (Eure-et-Loir)

The artist and model Suzanne Valadon encouraged her son Maurice Utrillo to paint by having him copy postcards of the winding, narrow streets of Montmartre, which had become the artistic center of Paris by the early 1900s. After six years of hard work and little reward the young artist had his first success depicting the urban landscape in 1909 when three of his paintings were included in the Salon d'Automne and the writer and art dealer Louis Libaude purchased a number of his works. Clovis Sagot, a former clown and pastry chef with an eye for the Paris avant-garde, sold Utrillo's paintings (and an occasional Picasso as well) out of a former pharmacy on rue Lafite, a few doors down from Ambroise Vollard's gallery.
The present large canvas depicts the majestic soaring façade of Chartres cathedral. Painted circa 1912-1914, La Cathédrale de Chartres (Eure-et-Loir) belongs to the period in which Utrillo developed his distinctive manière blanche, employing bleached tonalities, rigorous perspective and an uncanny firmness of construction. The quiet atmosphere and stillness of the composition is enhanced by the modulation and variation of white pigment, meticulously obtained by mixing plaster with glue and zinc oxide, through which the artist was able to achieve a simulation of the textural effects of the surfaces of the medieval building. Roland Dorgelès recounted how "his production never seemed faithful enough for him...To render color, he crushed his tubes of paint and went into a rage when he couldn't find the right one. 'They're not in silver-white, the façades, are they? Not in zinc white...They are made of plaster...' He absolutely needed to obtain the exact same chalky white" (quoted in D. Franck, Bohemian Paris, New York, 2001, p. 10).
Although his life was plagued by alcoholism and self-destruction, Utrillo's artistic genius was unwavering with a remarkable gift for composition and unerring sense of color relation. Around the time the present work was painted, Utrillo's dealer Louis Libaude, writing under his pseudonym Louis Lormel, observed: “Utrillo excels in painting the cracked walls of old houses. The smallest miserable front takes on in his paintings an extraordinary intensity of color and life… He is also a painter of the suburbs… He loves the morose steeples of old churches, the deserted streets of the gloomy suburbs… Maurice Utrillo evokes, above all, for every sensitive Parisian the nostalgia of his native city, its sickly sky, its resigned houses” (Maurice Utrillo, exh. cat., Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, 1913).