Job

In the Old Testament, Job loses his children, his wealth and his health in quick succession, and still refuses to curse God. Bonnat showed him at the Salon of 1880 as a gaunt old man, naked on a scatter of straw, a twisted band round his head, arms thrown open and eyes turned upward, lit hard against the dark. The canvas then stayed in his studio for six years, until he gave it to the state in 1887. After decades in the Luxembourg museum in Paris, it was sent in 1932 to the museum in his home town of Bayonne, which bore his name. It came back to Paris in 2013, and that autumn it hung in the Musée d'Orsay's exhibition of the male nude. In September 2025 it returned to Bayonne on deposit, shortly before the renovated Musée Bonnat-Helleu reopened.