Mademoiselle Marie Dihau (1843–1935)

Marie Dihau was the sister of Désiré Dihau, the bassoonist at the Paris Opéra who appears in Degas's famous Orchestra of the Paris Opéra. Degas was a close friend of the Dihau family and painted Marie — herself a pianist — in 1869–1870, producing a portrait that avoids the formality of official portraiture in favour of showing her at the piano in her own environment. The portrait is one of a sequence of intimate character studies Degas made of his friends before his vision of the human subject became more abstracting in his later career.

Degas places Marie at the keyboard, her face turning slightly away from the instrument in a momentary pause — a compositional approach that captures the interrupted rhythm of a practice session rather than a performance. The background, hung with paintings, contextualises her as a cultivated person in a domestic interior rather than a professional musician on stage.