Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore is primarily a medical school, but in the reading room of its Welch Medical Library hangs one of John Singer Sargent's largest group portraits. The Four Doctors, more than 3 metres tall, shows four of the school's founding professors in academic gowns: the pathologist William Welch, the surgeon William Halsted standing at the back, the physician William Osler and the gynaecologist Howard Kelly.

The picture was paid for by Mary Elizabeth Garrett, the Baltimore heiress whose gift had allowed the school to open in 1893, on condition that it admit women on the same terms as men. She commissioned it in 1903 for 10,000 dollars, and in 1905 the four sat for Sargent in his London studio, three of them travelling from Baltimore to join Osler, who had just moved to Oxford. Behind them Sargent painted a large Venetian globe and a mounted horseman taken from a painting by El Greco, the Spanish master.

The painting has hung in the library's West Reading Room since 1929, with Sargent's portrait of Garrett herself over the fireplace. In 2026 conservators cleaned it, and removing the old varnish brought the doctors' faces back from a brownish tone to their original colour.