Joseph, also known as Joseph le nègre, was a 19th-century Haitian acrobat and actor who is best known as an art model. Active primarily in Paris, Joseph is remembered for his professional relationship with the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault for whom he served as a principal model for the painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a French painter and lithographer, whose best-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa. Despite his short life, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.