Berlioz's House

France went to war in the summer of 1914. On 13 September, the date Utrillo wrote under his signature, the Battle of the Marne had just been fought east of Paris and the German armies were falling back. The museum thinks the small tricolour on the right was added around then, possibly to a panel he had begun two or three years earlier. The house stood at the corner of rue Saint-Vincent and rue du Mont-Cenis in Montmartre. The composer Hector Berlioz lived there with his wife from 1834 to 1837, and in 1911 the painter Georges Braque set up a studio in it. Utrillo shows both façades at once, as if from two viewpoints, reducing the building to a white shape outlined in black. It did not outlast the war. It was pulled down and replaced by an apartment block.