Mademoiselle Dihau au piano

In 1890 the young Toulouse-Lautrec was making his name in the cabarets of Montmartre, but this quiet portrait comes from closer to home. Marie Dihau was his cousin, a singer and piano teacher, and it was in the Montmartre apartment she shared with her brother that Lautrec had been introduced to Edgar Degas, the artist he admired above all others. That family was steeped in music. Her older brother Désiré played the bassoon at the Paris Opera and is the figure Degas set at the centre of his painting of the opera orchestra, a canvas Marie kept on her own wall. Here Lautrec paints her turned from her piano, in the rapid, thinned strokes he often laid straight onto cardboard. He liked to call himself her ordinary painter. She left this portrait, and those of her two brothers, to the town of Albi.