Musée de l’Orangerie · 1905
Butte Pinson
Maurice Utrillo
Utrillo paints this tangle of bare winter trees almost like a screen or veil in front of the scene, letting only fragments of the huts and rooftops behind show through the branches.
Why it matters
Utrillo paints this tangle of bare winter trees almost like a screen or veil in front of the scene, letting only fragments of the huts and rooftops behind show through the branches.
Look closer
Follow the thin trunks up through the canvas, painted with quick, individual strokes of yellow, orange and dark green rather than a single flat brown — then find the small red-roofed hut and the teal-green building glimpsed between the branches, the only solid colour anchors in an otherwise tangled scene.
Painted in 1905, before the pale, plaster-white Montmartre street scenes that made him famous, this work shows Utrillo still working in a looser, more Impressionist-influenced style — Butte Pinson, a modest hillside north of Paris, was a real place he returned to more than once, far from the postcard version of Montmartre most visitors expect from him.
Value context
ELYIO places this work in an indicative editorial context of €0.4–0.9 million.
The museum work is not for sale. This is ELYIO indicative context—not an appraisal, insurance value or offer.