Hi, Pushing.
I can’t give you “cold, hard, irrefutable facts”, and especially not just from looking at a photograph, but…
Utrillo is certainly known as a fan of thickly-trowelled paint in many of his works. However, the more I look at this, the more it looks like someone has rather amateurishly over-painted a print of the original work with oils and gone a bit overboard with that technique. To my eye, the over-painter has struggled to retain detail is some areas; either clumsily painting round them, or subsequently heavily retouching them, and avoiding the tricky areas such as the tree branches.
Look more closely at these comparisons, and especially the church spire, the spiked ridge tiles on its roof to the right, the figures on the bridge and the stonework/parapets either side.
The signature on a print derived by a photographic process will of course match that of the original and – if the match is exact – that’s a bad sign for an original work.
Regardless of my opinion (for what it’s worth) the brushwork is so dramatically different that no authenticator is going to attribute this to Utrillo without some confirmatory provenance/provenience that leads back in some way to the artist.
Has a BBC programme called “Fake or Fortune” hosted by Fiona Bruce reached any US network yet? The premise for the show is that art experts research a painting or other work of art believed by the owner to be a long-lost or previously unknown masterpiece. It’s a great watch for anyone interested in the history of art, but one thing that always stands out is how important provenance/provenience is to the attribution… or not.
