Maurice Utrillo (December 26, 1883 – November 5, 1955) was a French Post-Impressionist landscape painter and a leading figure of the School of Paris. Throughout his life, he devoted himself to painting street scenes of the Montmartre district in Paris, earning him the reputation as the "Artist of Montmartre" and the "Son of Paris." A self-taught artist, he occupies a highly unique position in 20th-century art history.

Utrillo was born out of wedlock in Montmartre, Paris, to an unknown father. His mother, Suzanne Valadon, had been a renowned model for Impressionist masters such as Renoir, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and later taught herself to become a painter. The Spanish art critic Miguel Utrillo legally recognized him, giving him his surname (though some sources suggest his biological father may have been the painter Puvis de Chavannes, who was forty years older than Valadon).

Utrillo is regarded as one of the most important landscape painters of the School of Paris. Unlike artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso, who left their homelands to pursue their dreams in Montmartre, he was one of the few renowned painters actually born in Montmartre and who spent most of his life there. His lifelong dedication to painting landscapes—especially those of Montmartre—imbued the district's everyday scenes with a melancholic, poetic atmosphere, evoking a dreamlike sense of antiquity.

Critics have compared him to the great landscape painters of the past: Guardi in the 18th century, and Robert and Corot in the 19th. Although Utrillo was not particularly innovative among the avant-garde, his works are celebrated in France and internationally for their powerful emotional resonance.

Nearly all of Utrillo's works take urban street scenes as their subject, particularly those of Montmartre. He favored painting streets in autumn and winter—churches, cafés, old houses, narrow alleys, and ancient mills—often with no human figures, evoking a sense of silence and solitude. With his rough brushwork and unpretentious technique, he expressed a deep affection for his native city.