Maurice Utrillo

Utrillo came to painting as a cure. As a teenager in Montmartre he was already drinking hard, and his mother, the artist's model turned painter Suzanne Valadon, put a brush in his hands hoping the work would steady him. He kept at it through repeated clinic stays and detox cures for the rest of his life.

His subject barely changed: the streets outside the door, the crooked houses, the little church of Saint-Pierre, the last windmills of the hill. He often worked from cheap picture postcards rather than the street itself, copying the view and then letting the light and the peeling plaster take over. Collectors most prize his 'white period', around 1909 to 1914, when he loaded the canvas with zinc white, sometimes mixed with plaster, to catch the exact chalky grey of an aging Paris wall.

He carried a borrowed name. Born to Valadon and an unknown father, he became Utrillo only in 1891, when the Catalan writer Miquel Utrillo agreed to sign the papers and give the eight-year-old his surname.