![]() “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Samuel Pozzi-handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat-he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. ![]() When Barnes ( The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. ![]() A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |