Le Docteur Pozzi chez lui

A handsome young surgeon stands at home in a blazing scarlet dressing gown, long fingers toying with its cord. Sargent's first great male portrait was so daring that he chose not to show it in Paris.

The story behind the painting

Samuel Jean de Pozzi was a French gynaecologist and art collector, aesthetic and charismatic, painted by John Singer Sargent in 1881 at around the age of 35. It was Sargent's first large portrait of a man, larger than life, 201.6 by 102.2 cm. Sargent did not exhibit it in Paris, perhaps to protect Pozzi's reputation. It was first shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1882 in London under the plain title A Portrait, the first of his works seen in London, and then at the first Les XX exhibition in Brussels in 1884.

What to look for

Instead of the sombre clothes of academic portraits of doctors, Pozzi stands informally in a full-length bright scarlet robe de chambre, tied with a red cord whose tassel dangles provocatively. The robe recalls a monastic habit and Renaissance portraits of popes and cardinals, yet also a woman's tea gown. His weight rests on his left leg, head turned, a red slipper with white embroidery peeking from the hem. The red repeats in the floor and the velvet curtains. Against it stand out his face, his white shirt ruffles and his long, elegant fingers, one hand at his breast, the other loosening the cord.

Meaning and intent

The dominant red may refer to the blood spilled in his work as a surgeon. The attention to his hands compliments his surgical skill but also alludes to the sensuality of a man who insisted on performing intimate examinations of his female patients. His watery eyes and mottled knuckles may have been meant to suggest neurasthenia. The portrait is at once a tribute and something more ambiguous, a professional man shown not at work but at home, magnificent and slightly unsettling.

Legacy

Pozzi kept the portrait until his death in 1918; his widow and then his son Jean Pozzi kept it after him. Armand Hammer acquired it after Jean's death in 1967, and after Hammer died in 1990 it passed in 1991 to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Sargent himself moved to London in 1884 after the scandal of his Portrait of Madame X in Paris. An exhibition in 2015 at the National Portrait Gallery in London and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired Julian Barnes's 2019 book The Man in the Red Coat.