Description
Year of creation: 1867–1868
Original size: 27.3 cm x 22.2 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 29.100.182)
Mademoiselle Marie Dihau – Edgar Degas
The woman is painted in sharp profile, turned to the left, seated at a table. She wears a dark hat with a green ornament, a dark fur trim across the shoulders, and a long black earring. Our hand-painted oil painting keeps that quiet, almost domestic pose.
The sharp profile
The profile is drawn with a single decisive line: forehead, nose, lips and chin run almost without a break. The sitter does not pose for the viewer and does not seek his eye; she looks straight ahead, as though the painter had sat down at the table and worked during a conversation. The canvas measures barely 27.3 x 22.2 cm, the size a painter carries with him.
The shawl as the only loud colour
At her left lies a large rolled shawl with a strong red, white and green pattern – the only loud colour on the canvas. In front of her a plate with something small stands on the table, beside it a knife and a yellow object at the right edge. The background is only a few vertical strokes suggesting a curtain and a greenish band of light.
The sitter and her family
The edges of the canvas are visible, because the picture was never stretched on a frame. The sitter was the pianist Marie Dihau, sister of the bassoonist in the Opera orchestra; the same face at the keyboard carries Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, and the musical circle around the family Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the portrait to 1867–1868.
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.
