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).

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.

[2] 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.

[7] 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.

[8][14] 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".

[1] 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'".

[16] 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.

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)[19] 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".

[3][Note 4] 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.

[15][Note 5] 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.

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.