Joseph

Joseph (pronounced [ʒozef]) also known as Joseph le Nègre (c. 1793 – c. 1865) was a 19th-century Haitian acrobat and art model active primarily in France. Joseph is best known for his work with the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault and served as a principal and only Black model for Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819).

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. He is said to have 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 Haitian Revolution and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the French colonies (which lasted from 1794 until 1804, before being legalized again by Napoleon).

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