The Four Doctors

When Johns Hopkins ran short of money to open its medical school in the 1890s, a group of wealthy women led by Mary Elizabeth Garrett made up the difference, on one condition: that women be admitted on the same terms as men. The school agreed, and these are four of the men it went on to make famous, William Welch, William Halsted, William Osler and Howard Kelly, its founding professors. Garrett later paid Sargent to paint them together. He posed them in his London studio in 1905, set a large Venetian globe beside the surgeon Halsted to balance the group, and hung a painting by El Greco's son on the wall behind. The finished canvas stands close to ten feet tall.