Within the Sacred Wood

Within the Sacred Wood Just who was the father of Maurice Utrillo? The list of possibilities suggested at one time or another as the sire of the late, famed, alcoholic painter of Montmartre scenes sounds like a roll call of 19th century greats. Renoir used to pose Utrillo's mother, cognac-haired Marie Clementine Valadon, nude in the back of his garden. Toulouse-Lautrec was' her bosom companion and persuaded her to adopt the more stylish name of Suzanne. Degas took her under his wing, assured her, "You are one of us."

When Suzanne, at 18, gave birth to Maurice, the man most generally assumed to be the father was a no-account Sunday painter and alcoholic named Boissy whom Suzanne had met at the revels held at Montmartre's Chat Noir cafe. Suzanne herself was never very specific--and perhaps could not be. But last week Maurice's widow, Lucie Valore Utrillo, decided to erase the doubt about daddy. After a festive municipal lunch in her honor at Limoges, where Lucie was pushing her recently published book, Maurice Utrillo, My Husband, she announced that Utrillo's real father was none other than Puvis de Chavannes, France's famed latter-day classicist painter.

"First of all," said Lucie in explanation, "there exists a striking resemblance. They had the same face and skeptical character." Then in addition she claimed to have a letter from Puvis de Chavannes' lawyer offering to make an annual settlement of 200 francs on Maurice during his lifetime. Asked Lucie pointedly: "Why do you think Chavannes offered to pay that pension?"

Lucie's claim may have something to it. Noted one French critic: "At one time Suzanne Valadon served Chavannes as a model and stayed with him for several weeks." That Chavannes had Suzanne on his mind, there could be no doubt. One of his most famous paintings, The Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and the Muses, completed in 1884 (one year after Maurice was born), shows twelve figures in diaphanous togas plus three striplings. Model for the adults, male and female: Suzanne Valadon.

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