Joseph (art model)

Joseph's family name has not been recorded, although it is believed that he was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, around 1793.{{Cite web |date=2023 |title=Study of the Model Joseph, Nineteenth-Century Paris, and Romanticism |url=https://artsandculture.google.com/story/joseph-a-celebrated-haitian-model-in-19th-century-paris/YQVBQHr1FmMF-Q |access-date=10 February 2023 |publisher=J. Paul Getty Museum |language=en |type=Online exhibition |publication-place=Los Angeles |via=Google Arts & Culture Project |archive-date=10 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230210232811/https://artsandculture.google.com/story/joseph-a-celebrated-haitian-model-in-19th-century-paris/YQVBQHr1FmMF-Q |url-status=live }} 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.{{Cite news |last=Mourgues |first=Elsa |date=22 March 2019 |title=Joseph ou le renouveau du modèle noir au XIXe |trans-title=Joseph or the Revival of the Black Model in the 19th Century |url=https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/joseph-ou-le-renouveau-du-modele-noir-au-xixe-5846944 |access-date=11 February 2023 |newspaper=France Culture |language=fr |archive-date=11 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230211035747/https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/joseph-ou-le-renouveau-du-modele-noir-au-xixe-5846944 |url-status=live }}{{Cite book |last=Allen |first=Denise Maria |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51294110 |title=Masterpieces of Painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum |date=2003 |publisher=J. Paul Getty Museum |isbn=0-89236-709-1 |edition=5th |location=Los Angeles |pages=86 |language=en |oclc=51294110}} 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.

File:Joseph dans Le Radeau de la Méduse.jpg (1819) by Théodore Géricault, showing figures said to have been modeled by Joseph.]]

Joseph gained recognition after serving as a principal model for Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, an 1818–1819 painting depicting a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816.{{Cite web |last=Solly |first=Meilan |date=27 March 2017 |title=Musée d'Orsay Renames Manet's 'Olympia' and Other Works in Honor of Their Little-Known Black Models |url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/musee-dorsay-renames-manets-olympia-honor-its-little-known-black-model-180971812/ |access-date=10 February 2023 |website=Smithsonian Magazine |language=en |archive-date=10 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230210232811/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/musee-dorsay-renames-manets-olympia-honor-its-little-known-black-model-180971812/ |url-status=live }} 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. According to some accounts, only one of the fifteen survivors on the raft, a soldier named Jean Charles, was Black. Several art historians and critics have argued, however, that Géricault included three Black individuals in the composition. All are said to have been modeled after Joseph.{{Cite web |last=Doridou-Heim |first=Anne |date=13 May 2019 |title=Black Models |url=https://www.gazette-drouot.com/en/article/black-models/7011 |access-date=16 March 2023 |website=Gazette Drouot |language=en |quote=Théodore Géricault harnessed his fiery romanticism to the abolitionist cause and included three black figures –the same man thrice, Joseph, a model employed at the l'École des Beaux-Arts de Paris – at the peak of his masterpiece, "The Raft of the Medusa". |archive-date=6 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230306000339/https://www.gazette-drouot.com/en/article/black-models/7011 |url-status=live }}{{Cite book |last1=Hagen |first1=Rose-Marie |url= |title=What Great Paintings Say: From the Bayeaux Tapestry to Diego Rivera |last2=Hagen |first2=Rainer |date=2005 |publisher=Taschen |isbn=3-8228-4790-9 |location=Köln |pages=378 |oclc=}}

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. Influenced by an ancient Greek Classical sculpture titled Belvedere Torso and with his back turned toward the viewer, Joseph's silhouette is placed atop the pyramidal grouping of survivors in the composition's right half.{{Cite web |last=Black McCoy |first=Claire |date=27 May 2021 |title=Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa |url=https://smarthistory.org/theodore-gericault-raft-of-the-medusa/ |access-date=11 February 2023 |website=Smarthistory |archive-date=11 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230211005343/https://smarthistory.org/theodore-gericault-raft-of-the-medusa/ |url-status=live }} During the same time, Géricault completed a study of the model's back.File:Musée Ingres-Bourdelle - Etude de dos pour Le Radeau de La Méduse (d'après le modèle Joseph) 1818-1819 - Théodore Géricault MID.55.4.1 Jodonde06070001419.jpg, Montauban|240x240px|left]] File:Belvedere Torso-Vatican Museums-2.jpg 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.|left]]The 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. Around the same time Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, the artist also completed a portrait study of Joseph, dressed in military uniform, in a manner consistent with tête d'étude, or a head study, an established tradition in the French studio practice wherein a portrait of an individual is painted for possible use in large-scale compositions.{{Cite book |last=Snell |first=Robert |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1029237276 |title=Portraits of the Insane: Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy |date=2018 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-429-47840-6 |edition= |location=London |oclc=1029237276}} In doing so, the painter represents the subject "with a directness and immediacy that is often lacking in formal portraiture".{{Cite book |url= |title=Masterpieces of Painting: J. Paul Getty Museum |date=2019 |publisher=J. Paul Getty Museum |others=Scott Allan, Davide Gasparotto, Peter Björn Kerber, Anne T. Woollett |isbn=978-1-60606-579-2 |location=Los Angeles |pages=111 |oclc=}}

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.Apollo. A Journal of the Arts (1930).United Kingdom: Apollo Press Limited. Vol. 11-12: 217.{{Cite book |url= |title=The Image of the Black in Western Art |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2012 |isbn=978-0-674-05271-0 |editor-last=Gates, Jr. |editor-first=Henry Louis |edition= |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |pages=38 |language=en |chapter=Studies |editor-last2=Bindman |editor-first2=David}} 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".{{Cite book |last=Brathwaite |first=Peter |url= |title=Rediscovering Black Portraiture |publisher=Getty Publications |others=Cheryl Finley, Temi Odumosu, Mark Sealy (contributors) |year=2023 |isbn=978-1-60606-816-8 |location=Los Angeles |pages=119 |oclc=}} 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.

Géricault identified as an abolitionist and his decision to include representations of Black people in The Raft of the Medusa has been interpreted as a political statement against slavery and French colonialism.{{Cite news |last=Combis |first=Hélène |date=22 March 2019 |others=Interview with Bona Manangu |title=Qui était Joseph, modèle noir du Radeau de la Méduse? |trans-title=Who was Joseph, black model of the Raft of the Medusa? |url=https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/qui-etait-joseph-modele-noir-du-radeau-de-la-meduse-8664302 |access-date=11 February 2023 |newspaper=France Culture |language=fr |archive-date=11 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230211235136/https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/qui-etait-joseph-modele-noir-du-radeau-de-la-meduse-8664302 |url-status=live }} 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".{{Cite book |last=Alhadeff |first=Albert |url= |title=Théodore Géricault. Painting Black Bodies: Confrontations and Contradictions |date=2020 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-367-31333-3 |location=New York |pages=165–167 |language=en |chapter=Quotidian Portraits |oclc=}} 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.{{Cite book |last=Lathers |first=Marie |url= |title=Dictionary of Artists' Models |date=2001 |publisher=Fitzroy Dearborn |isbn=1-57958-233-8 |editor-last=Banham |editor-first=Joanna |location=London |pages=15 |language=en |chapter=Changing Tastes |oclc= |editor-last2=Jiminez |editor-first2=Jill Berk}}

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{{' "}}.{{Cite journal |last1=Berger |first1=Klaus |last2=Johnson |first2=Diane Chalmers |date=1969 |title=Art as Confrontation: The Black Man in the Work of Gericault |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25087857 |journal=The Massachusetts Review |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=301–340 |issn=0025-4878 |jstor=25087857 |access-date=12 February 2023 |archive-date=15 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230215004957/https://www.jstor.org/stable/25087857 |url-status=live }} 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. Echoing this sentiment, the Congolese writer and artist Bona Mangangu describes Joseph's Black body as "powerful, in good health, rising above the white bodies, survivors of the raft weakened by disease and fatigue". According to Come Fabre, a curator at the Louvre, Paris where Géricault's painting is on permanent display, the artist "wanted to show the equality of man when facing terror and death".{{Cite news |last=Bar |first=Roni |date=6 February 2017 |title=Cannibalism, Insanity and Class Warfare: The Tragedy Behind 'The Raft of the Medusa' Painting |language=en |work=Haaretz |url=https://www.haaretz.com/life/2017-02-06/ty-article-magazine/the-tragedy-behind-the-raft-of-the-medusa/0000017f-e2fa-d7b2-a77f-e3ff95f00000 |access-date=11 February 2023 |archive-date=25 September 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220925081542/https://www.haaretz.com/life/2017-02-06/ty-article-magazine/the-tragedy-behind-the-raft-of-the-medusa/0000017f-e2fa-d7b2-a77f-e3ff95f00000 |url-status=live }}

File:Musée Ingres-Bourdelle - Etude d'après le modèle Joseph, 1839 - Théodore Chasseriau - Joconde06070001378.jpg, Study for Negro, oil on canvas, {{c.|1836}}, Musée Ingres Bourdelle]]

File:PujolBaptemeEthiopie.jpg]]

File:(Cahors) Joseph le nègre par Adolphe Brune - Musée Henri-Martin.jpg, Joseph, le nègre, oil on canvas, 1865, {{Ill|Musée de Cahors Henri-Martin|fr}}|right]]

In 1832, Joseph was hired at l'École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, becoming one of only three male models. He held the position until at least 1835.{{Cite web |last=Peck |first=Aaron |date=22 June 2019 |title=Reframing the Black Model at the Musée d'Orsay |url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/06/22/reframing-the-black-model-at-the-musee-dorsay/ |url-access=subscription |access-date=9 March 2023 |website=The New York Review of Books |language=en |archive-date=6 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230306000335/https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/06/22/reframing-the-black-model-at-the-musee-dorsay/ |url-status=live }}{{Cite journal |last=Bailey |first=Colin B. |date=19 December 2019 |title=In Plain Sight |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/manet-black-model-plain-sight/ |journal=The New York Review of Books |volume=LXVI |issue=20 |pages=59–63 |url-access=subscription |access-date=26 March 2023 |archive-date=26 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230326183532/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/manet-black-model-plain-sight/ |url-status=live }} 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".{{Cite journal |last=Butterfield-Rosen |first=Emmelyn |date=October 2019 |title=The Modern Woman: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on 'Posing Modernity' and 'Black Models' |url=https://www.artforum.com/print/201908/emmelyn-butterfield-rosen-on-posing-modernity-and-black-models-80814 |journal=Artforum |volume=58 |issue=2 |pages=188–201 |access-date=1 March 2023 |archive-date=1 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230301050807/https://www.artforum.com/print/201908/emmelyn-butterfield-rosen-on-posing-modernity-and-black-models-80814 |url-status=live }}

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) was made aware that Ingres had planned to use Joseph in a religious composition Christ Expelling Satan from the Holy Mountain and depict him as "the devil cast down from the mountaintop". In a painting by Abel de Pujol completed in 1848 and drawing upon a Biblical subject matter, Joseph is depicted as a eunuch of the Queen of Ethiopia being baptized by Saint Philip.

Joseph went on to pose for other prominent French artists, including Horace Vernet, Alfred de Dreux, and Adolphe Brune. Surviving records indicate that he was primarily admired for his physique, which contemporary artists perceived as impressive and visually attractive. An article from the French newspaper {{Lang|fr|Le Figaro}} published in 1858 described Joseph as "the most beautiful model who ran the ateliers of Paris" and said that there was not a single French "artist, painter or sculptor who does not know Joseph".

At the same time, Alhadeff suggests that surviving contemporary accounts of Joseph—including a derogatory 1840 passage by the French writer Émile de La Bédollière where the model is portrayed as a "clown who can barely sit still" and reduced to a "familiar caricature"—point to the continued perception of Black people as that of an inferior race. Despite his success in the art circles of Paris, Joseph was not broadly recognized and, similarly to other people of color, continued to face systemic racism in France even after slavery had finally been abolished in 1848. Bona Mangangu further explains that art modeling was considered a "vile profession" ("vil métier") which usually paid an average of three Francs per each session, a relatively small amount.

Among the late surviving depictions of Joseph is a painting by Brune, likely painted during the 1840s, which was exhibited at the 1865 academic salon in Paris. In this composition, Joseph is seen with his torso exposed, seated against a natural backdrop and holding a porcelain cup while smiling. According to scholar Jean Nayrolles, Brune's late composition continues to perpetuate racial stereotypes through the subject's "anthropological gaze" ("le regard anthropologique"), associating the Black body with the state of "benevolent" ("bienveillante") nature and sexuality.{{Cite journal |last=Nayrolles |first=Jean |date=1 April 2010 |title=Le nègre Joseph. Trois images du Noir |url=https://hal-univ-tlse2.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00968062 |journal=Midi-Pyrénées Patrimoine |language=fr |pages=64 |access-date=23 July 2020 |archive-date=26 October 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201026165633/https://hal-univ-tlse2.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00968062 |url-status=live }}

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. His exact death date is unknown, although it is estimated he died sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s.{{Cite web |title=Adolphe Brune, 'Joseph, le nègre', 2nd half of the 19th century |url=https://musees-occitanie.fr/oeuvre/joseph-le-negre/ |access-date=16 March 2023 |website=Musées Occitanie |language=fr-FR |archive-date=16 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230316182551/https://musees-occitanie.fr/oeuvre/joseph-le-negre/ |url-status=live }}

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 2021, French writer Arnaud Beunaiche published Je suis Joseph, a fictionalized biographical account of the model. It premiered as a theatrical play at L'Imaginaire in Douchy-les-Mines in February 2022.{{Cite web |last= |date=29 December 2021 |title=Je suis Joseph. Cie l'Emporte-Voix |url=https://imaginaire-douchy.fr/agenda/la-saison-culturelle/article/je-suis-joseph |access-date=11 March 2023 |website=L'imaginaire |language=fr |archive-date=11 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311012120/https://imaginaire-douchy.fr/agenda/la-saison-culturelle/article/je-suis-joseph |url-status=live }} 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.{{Cite web |last=Ahdifard |first=Unita |date=9 February 2023 |title=Joseph: A Celebrated Haitian Model in 19th-Century Paris |url=https://www.getty.edu/news/joseph-a-celebrated-haitian-model-in-19th-century-paris |access-date=12 February 2023 |website=Getty Research Institute |language=en |archive-date=12 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230212192650/https://www.getty.edu/news/joseph-a-celebrated-haitian-model-in-19th-century-paris/ |url-status=live }}

• Fanny Eaton
• Laure (art model)
• Pierre Louis Alexandre

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"Only one Black soldier survived the 13 days at sea, succumbing later to his wounds after being rescued." {{harvnb|Bar|2017}}

The painting is listed among the works exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. See [https://www.google.com/books/edition/Almanach_de_la_litt%C3%A9rature_du_th%C3%A9atre/5tsZAAAAYAAJ Almanach de la littérature du théatre et des beaux-arts]. Paris: Pagnerre, 1865, p. 68. However, Nayrolles estimates the painting was made in the 1840s. {{harvnb|Nayrolles|2010}}

"For how could you think otherwise, that a [Black] from Haiti, burned by the tropical sun, is going to stand still ... No; before you, his face suddenly breaks out into a broad grin ... he's recounting stories, he laughs at the top of his voice, a full throated roar; he longs for his birthplace; [posing in the studio and] warmed by the heat of the stove, he dreams of the Antilles and its warmth, and with the odors rising from the glowing sheet-ironed stoves and the oils around him, he breathes the perfume of the orange trees." Émile de La Bédollière (1840), Le Modèle. English translation after {{harvnb|Alhadeff|2020}}

Géricault rented a studio in the Quartier du Faubourg-du-Roule in Paris in summer 1818 and began working on The Raft of the Medusa at that time. See Tinterow, Gary (Winter 1990–91). "Gericault's Heroic Landscapes: The Times of Day". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. 48 (3): 44.

"Il n'est pas en France un seul artiste peintre ou sculpteur qui ne connaisse Joseph le nègre, le plus beau modèle qui ait couru les ateliers de Paris." 'Un modèle philosophe', Le Figaro, 1858. {{harvnb|Mourgues|2019}}

"C'est un corps noir, puissant, en bonne santé, qui s'élève au-dessus des corps blancs, survivants du radeau affaiblis par la maladie et la fatigue. Le symbole est très fort." {{harvnb|Combis|2019}}

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