La signorina Marie Dihau (1843-1935)

Marie Dihau lived in Lille and worked in Paris, coming up whenever there was singing or piano work to be had. Degas knew the whole family. Her brother Desire played the bassoon in the orchestra at the Opera, and the Dihaus' flat was where their young cousin Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was introduced to him. Marie remembered that this portrait was done fast, in a restaurant, and the picture keeps the evidence. She sits in sharp profile between the remains of a finished meal and her carpetbag, a travelling musician caught between one engagement and the next in 1867 or 1868. The canvas is tiny, 22 by 27 centimetres. It left France with the American collectors the Havemeyers and reached New York in 1929.