Marie Dihau

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Marie Dihau (12 September 1843 – 14 May 1935) was a French singer, pianist as well as singing and piano teacher.

Life

Dihau was born in Lille in 1843.[1]

She studied music at the

Orchestre de la Société des concerts du Conservatoire. She divided her time between her hometown and Paris where she settled with her brother after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War
.

It is in their apartment on Montmartre, at number 6 rue Frochot, that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, their cousin, was introduced to Edgar Degas. In 1867-1868, he painted her first portrait, Mademoiselle Marie Dihau, kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between 1869 and 1872, he painted a second portrait of the artist, Mademoiselle Dihau au piano, kept at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.[3]

In 1890, Lautrec, who called himself her "ordinary painter", a great admirer of Degas, painted another portrait entitled Mademoiselle Dihau au piano, kept at the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec of Albi[4] and in 1898 La Leçon de chant where Dihau at the piano accompanies her friend Mrs Janne Favereau standing up. The painting is exposed at the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum of Cairo.[5]

The paintings are hung in the Dihau's living room and then, after Désiré's death in 1909, in Marie's modest apartment on rue Victor-Massé where "the charming old maid lives off a small income and the product of the music lessons she gives, often free of charge, to the young girls of Montmartre who are preparing to sing in the cafés".

Musée du Louvre where they were exhibited after Dihau's death in 1935. They were transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.[6]
Under the same conditions, she bequeathed her portrait and the portraits of her two brothers painted by Toulouse-Lautrec to the city of Albi, which assigned them to the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum upon her death.

Dihau died in Paris on 14 May 1935 at age 92.[1]

References