Copying Utrillo: Place du Tertre

The title of this piece is misleading insofar as it suggests some sort of slavish process in which I was trying to make an exact copy of a painting to supply the considerable market for “originals”. But copying of this kind is a lifeless exercise, in which the (compound) colours and draughtsmanship of the original cannot possibly be reproduced.

Maurice Utrillo V, Place du Tertre. 1911

So what have I done? Certainly, I have kept broadly to Utrillo’s composition; as I have also taken cues from his colour palatte. In particular the earth colours: burnt umber, and red and yellow ochre. Other colours – emerald green, manganese violet, napthol red and kings blue (modern formulations of pigments) – I've introduced. Perhaps then, the colours and the handling of the paint are key to this not being a copy, but in some ways something new.

Peter Hart, after Utrillo's Place du Tertre. 2021

However much of the above may be true, my painting is an historical curiosity in that the Place du Tertre no longer looks anything like it did when Utrillo painted it. Quiet as it may be due to current circumstances, it is normally bustling with tourists and diners–out. The restaurant to the right, Chez la Mere Catherine, is still in business, with seating flowing out onto the pavement. Yet all the other clutter of our times – and in particular cars and the shop and restaurant chains – has made this kind of street scene impossible as a subject. ¹ And painters like Monet, Pissarro, and Van Gogh would have despaired at what they saw (and it may be said of the countryside that modern farm machinery lacks all the poetry of the horse–drawn plough—and the idea of a combine harvester in a landscape by Constable or Stubbs is inconceivable).  

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It can be seen that I have only sketched in a few of the cross bars on the shutters, and have included only one chimney pot. Also I have barely sketched vin tabac on the café to the right and not included patisserie on the shop next door. The reason for these omissions is to prevent what might be called irrelevant details detracting from the overall composition. ² So,   vin tabac adds scarcely more than a variation to the texture and colour of the painting. Additionally, I've changed the rectangle above the café into a circle, because otherwise the composition would be dominated by squares, rectangles, and triangles, leading to monotony. The circle also echoes the curves of the pavements to the left and the right (though I was not aware of this at the time of painting).

Echoes and contrasts of all kinds are important as compositional elements. Probably it can readily be seen that the red–browns, the ochre, the blues, and the violets are distributed across the picture plane. But there is also the emerald green on the side of the building next to the café on the right, which is repeated on the “scuff–edging” of the building on the far left (and perhaps vestigialally on the shop front in the centre). All these aspects of a painting guard against tiredness and mindless repetition, and tend (if successful) to a certain dynamism. These qualities were all emphasised by Ruskin, in some of the finest art criticism ever written. Yet this troubled genius was forever judging paintings to the degree that they represented “truth to nature”. ³  This poses the question, “Are either Utrillo’s painting or my “copy” of it, “true to nature?” I have no more interest in this than Utrillo did! What he sought out were opportunities to explore composition and – crucially – colour. And my use of his work is really no more than a variation of his colours and shapes on a flat surface—bearing no more than a vestigial reference to any extant reality.     

Notes

John Register, Parking Lot by the Ocean, 1976. Acrylic

¹ There are some exceptions to this. Edward Hopper includes cars in some of his compositions, but they are back–grounded and usually peripheral. Another painter (also American) is John Register, a sober realist who invested mundane subjects – very often a chair or chairs in the setting of an office, a café, or a waiting room – with a sort of poetry of uneasy expectancy. In the reproduction below he has transferred this atmosphere to an automobile. Register has been compared to Hopper, but said, “With Hopper you witness someone else's isolation; in my pictures, I think you, the viewer, become the isolated one.”    

²

Cezanne, The Black Clock, c 1870

If Cézanne included a bottle in his still lifes he would never include the lettering on the label, because he did not want any distraction from the timelessness of his compositions. Similarly in The Black Marble Clock, Cézanne has not painted the hands on the clock face. Laurence Gowing has pointed out that, “… the hands would have been below the critical size for inclusion in this summary sweep of tones” (Cézanne: The Early Years, 1859–1872). I agree with this, but I think another reason for the omission of the hands is to prevent the distraction of people making stupid remarks, such as, “Look he painted this at seven thirty–three”—or whatever.

³ I doubt that truth to nature, as Ruskin perceived it, has ever been possible. Most paintings are studio productions. And if artists set their easels up at a particular place outside, they will find that the lighting and shadows change so much, as the hours – and sometimes even minutes – pass – that to capture how their subject looked at a particular moment is impossible. Even Ruskin undermines his own theory of “truth to nature” when he writes, in The Elements of Drawing, “… it would never be possible for you to gradate your scales so truly as to make them practicably accurate and serviceable; and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a frost–bitten apple.”