Maurice Utrillo was a French artist noted for his naïve yet picturesque cityscapes. Rendered in thickly troweled paint, the artist portrayed the winding streets and alleyways in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. “On a particularly boring day, I had a clever but unfortunate inspiration,” he reflected. “I seized a piece of cardboard, some tubes of tint and petroleum base—since I lacked real oil—and, confronting a typical Montmartre street corner, I suddenly found myself a practitioner of this difficult and thankless art of painting.” Born Maurice Valadon on December 26, 1883 in Paris, France, his mother was the painter and artist’s model Suzanne Valadon. With the encouragement of his mother and...