Joseph

Joseph , also known as 'Joseph le nègre He arrived in France in or around 1804 and first settled in Marseille. By 1808, Joseph had moved to Paris where he was hired as an acrobat and actor for Madame Saqui's troupe. Joseph was one of the many immigrants who had left Haiti in the aftermath of the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the French colonies (which lasted from 1794 until 1804 when it was legalized again by Napoleon). A 2023 digital exhibition by the J. Paul Getty Museum suggests that he lived in the 9th or 17th arrondissement like many other immigrants and those involved in the arts, including Laure, a Black female model who worked with Édouard Manet. Joseph, whom Géricault had first encountered during an acrobatic show, was hired as a model shortly after the artist began working on The Raft of the Medusa in 1818.

Most notably, Joseph served as a model for the man assumed to be Jean Charles, waving a dark red handkerchief in hopes of being noticed by the passing ship. During the same time, Géricault completed a study of the model's back.thumb Belvedere Torso, fragment of a Neo-Attic sculpture from the 1st century CE, which is said to have served as an inspiration for Géricault's depiction of Joseph. Vatican Museums, Vatican City. leftThe artist also incorporated a small rendering of Joseph's face in the composition. Looking at the viewer, he is flanked by two White men placed to the right of the wooden mast. In doing so, the painter represents the subject "with a directness and immediacy that is often lacking in formal portraiture".

Joseph has been described as Géricault's favorite model and the artist is said to have admired him as an individual, a sentiment art historians suggest is reflected in the deeply personal approach to the 1818–1819 portrait. When discussing the study, the British artist and writer Peter Brathwaite emphasizes Géricault's attention to detail in portraying a person of color and suggests that the viewer is invited into the "world of an actual, distinct person". Moreover, it has been suggested that Joseph served as inspiration for a third individual included in The Raft of the Medusa, a man seen seated in the middle of composition directly in front of the mast. Art historian Albert Alhadef, pointing to "strong antipathy" towards people of color among the general French public during the early 19th century, called the artist's inclusion of Black individuals in the painting an "extraordinary burst of fearless independence". Surviving accounts indicate that the decision was controversial. An Italian art model known as Cadamour, who also posed for The Raft of the Medusa, was allegedly "scandalized" that Géricault had decided to hire a Black model.

Art historians Klaus Berger and Diane Chalmers Johnson note that Géricault made the individual modeled on Joseph the "focal point of the drama, the strongest and most perceptive of the survivors, in a sense the 'hero of the scene. They argue that the artist's choice to do so was not a "last-minute" decision as evidenced by early sketches for the work, including the portrait study, and point to Géricault's concerns regarding the "extreme cruelties" of illegal slave trade in the French colonies.

Later career Paris Academy (1830s)

In 1832, Joseph was hired at l'École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, becoming one of only three male models. When discussing Joseph's career, scholar Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen notes that in 19th-century France "body of a life model functioned as a floating signifier, assuming different meanings when inserted into different compositional contexts" and in the case of Joseph, it was almost always conditioned by the cultural connotations Europeans "attached to his skin pigment".

In an 1836 study ordered by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the painter Théodore Chassériau shows Joseph floating against the sky and next to two small hand studies. At the time of its completion, Butterfield-Rosen says, neither the model nor the artist (who was a grandson of a Haitian landowner of mixed race)

Toward the end of his life and career, Joseph worked at the studio of the Swiss artist Charles Gleyre with whom he had become friends while living in Paris.

Legacy In 2019, an exhibition titled Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which focused on representation of the Black body in French modern art, included paintings of Joseph by Brune and Chassériau, among others. The show was an expanded version of a 2018 exhibition of the same name organized by Denise Murrell at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York. In 2023, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles organized a digital exhibition via Google Arts & Culture platform titled Study of the Model Joseph, Nineteenth-Century Paris, and Romanticism'' and dedicated entirely to Joseph.