Dr Pozzi at Home is a full-length portrait painted by John Singer Sargent in 1881. It shows Samuel Pozzi, a gynecologist of 35 and one of the most talked-about men in Paris, in a scarlet dressing gown, one hand at his chest and the other loosening the cord at his hip.
Paris society called him Doctor God, a nickname that came from Sarah Bernhardt. Sargent painted him in the late mornings, and the two men lunched together afterward.
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Sargent never exhibited it in Paris. He lived there, and the man in the red robe was one of the most talked-about figures in the city, yet the portrait did not hang in a single Paris show. Sargent sent it to London instead, to the Royal Academy in 1882, under the title A Portrait. The sitter went unnamed.
Henry James saw it on the Academy's walls. Three years later, in the summer of 1885, Pozzi was about to visit London, and Sargent wrote James a letter of introduction. It described the visitor as the man in the red gown (not always). The joke only works if the red gown was already Pozzi's trademark.
I think the absence explains more about the picture than any description of it does. Everything the portrait shows, the scarlet gown and the hands, belonged to a man all Paris already talked about.
Who was the man Paris called Doctor God?
Samuel Pozzi. Bernhardt, who coined the name, had been his lover before she became his friend, and he removed an ovarian cyst from her. He was born in 1846 in Bergerac, in the southwest of France, into a Protestant family of Italian origin. His father was a minister there. His mother died when he was ten.
In 1876 he traveled to Edinburgh to watch the surgeon Joseph Lister at work and came home a convinced Listerian. His two-volume treatise on gynecology stayed the standard French textbook into the 1930s. Society knew him as a charmer, and the profession knew him as a serious surgeon.
The two reputations met at his house on the Place Vendôme. When the young Marcel Proust was invited to his first dinner in town, it was at Pozzi's table. That is the house Sargent walked into with an easel, and the man he painted there was already a figure of gossip.
What You'll Discover
Why Sargent kept it from Paris.
What the red robe borrowed.
What his hands were doing.
How Pozzi's story really ended.