This book is not for everyone, but it was the right one at the right time for me. If you are interested in Belle Epoque Paris, John Singer Sargent, Proust, Oscar Wilde, and the literary feuds and affairs that kept Paris buzzing, then you’ve found a story to savor. I had to read it very slowly, twenty pages at a time, so I wouldn’t finish too soon. The structure is idiosyncratic: no chapter breaks and a rambling through-line. Barnes jumps about from character to character, incident to incident, but the reader ends up with a full picture. Few writers could pull it off. And if you’re familiar with Barnes’s fiction, this is nonfiction. I’ve been reading about John Singer Sargent lately, getting ready for the exhibit of his Paris work at the Metropolitan Museum.
The eponymous red-coated man is Samuel Pozzi, an gynecological surgeon, who, Zelig-like, turned up in all the most interesting places and knew all the right people in the arts and sciences. He was also incredibly handsome and knew it. Barnes was inspired to write the book after he saw Sargent’s painting of Pozzi in the National Portrait Gallery in London, on loan from its home at the Armand Hammer Foundation in Los Angeles. Like many of Sargent’s best portraits, it’s large, almost lifesize. I was so delighted to see it at the Met exhibition. It is positioned so that it draws your eye from several galleries away. And yes, Pozzi is extremely good-looking, with curly black hair, pale skin, and classically beautiful features. Barnes unpacks the portrait’s insinuations: Sargent’s choices in how he positioned Pozzi, the suggestive position of his hands, and the placement of the tassels of the red robe.
For Barnes, the portrait is the jumping-off point for musings about Pozzi and his friends. Barnes is witty — often snarky, insightful, and very entertaining. He takes great pains to describe the differences between the French and the British, who often bewilder each other, e.g., there’s no such thing as a crime passionel in the English court, but there certainly is in France and murderers (at least in the Belle Epoque) were often acquitted with that defense. The French skewer the English, especially the women. I can’t resist quoting this passage from Count Robert de Montesquieu on his first trip to London. At a restaurant, he comments on the ladies around him: “…robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet. They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rump-steak pie.” (Montesquieu is presumed to be the model for Charlus in Proust’s opus.) There are literary feuds that end in duels, many of them injurious but not fatal, with pretenses as trivial as a disagreement about whether the divine Sarah Bernhardt is thinner now than she used to be. Competition among writers leads to scurrilous reviews, hastening the feuds. Pozzi rides (mostly) above it all, traveling around the world to learn new surgical techniques, especially the treatment of gunshot wounds to the stomach (those duels, again). His marriage to Thérèse is unhappy, partly because of his many affairs, all discreetly managed, except the one that lasted for twenty years.
It’s hard to know where to begin and end in describing this book; there are so many characters, and it’s clear Barnes had fun writing it. The physical book is beautifully put together by Knopf: heavy white paper that contrasts nicely with an elegant font, generous margins, and beautifully reproduced paintings. In addition, Barnes includes Felix Potin’s collectible cigarette card photos of many of the characters in the book. I scored a copy of The Man in the Red Coat, on the sale table of my local bookstore; it looked too interesting to pass up and I was quite right to grab it.
Another recent title about Sargent that I enjoyed is Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse, about Sargent’s relationship with the Wertheimers, for whom he painted many portraits.
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