Description
Year of creation: 1869
Original size: 32.5 cm x 45 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 2416)
Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano – Edgar Degas
A young woman sits at the piano in a dark dress and turns over her shoulder towards us, as if someone had just called her name. Her face is the only truly lit part of the canvas; dress, chair and instrument melt into a nearly single dark mass out of which one gold earring catches the light. Our canvas painting keeps exactly that relation – one lit face and a room retreating into darkness around it.
The turn over the shoulder
Degas does not paint the playing; he paints the interruption of it. The body stays turned to the keyboard, the hands are already almost out of the scene, and the head has moved forward and up. The look does not reach us but passes us, towards someone standing to one side. That offset between body and head is what holds the small canvas taut: the scene is caught a few moments after the music stopped and a few moments before it resumes.
Sheet music that cannot be read
Open scores stand on the rest, painted as two pale planes with indicated staves and not one legible sign. At the upper right a dark patch of flowers, greened and orange, breaks the quiet grey-green wall. Music is present in the scene as an object and as light, never as a notation a viewer could follow. That is exactly why the work stays a portrait instead of becoming a concert scene.
The canvas edge as a cut
The canvas measures 32.5 x 45 cm – a small format that Degas uses as a detail cut from a larger scene. The right edge cuts off the piano and the score, at the lower left a hand is barely indicated, and the upper edge leaves the wall without an end. The same surname is carried by the portrait of Mademoiselle Marie Dihau, and music returns in the double portrait of Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas. The original is today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
