This painting depicts the Place du Tertre in Montmartre in the north of Paris. Utrillo preferred to set his paintings in autumn or winter, and always captured a sense of melancholy and desolation in his urban scenes. In this painting he has used cool colours for the façades of the buildings and the trees are bare. He painted mostly from memory and from postcards. Utrillo's work of 1910 to 1915 is widely regarded as his best and is termed his 'White Period'. He would often mix plaster with zinc white paint to give extra texture when painting buildings.