Job

Bonnat's 'Job' (1880), held at the Musée d'Orsay, is among his most powerful religious paintings, depicting the Old Testament patriarch at his moment of supreme suffering — stripped of prosperity, afflicted with terrible sickness, abandoned on a dung heap outside his city. The Book of Job, perhaps the most philosophically complex text in the Hebrew Bible, presents a man of complete righteousness subjected to extreme suffering. Bonnat's treatment is notable for its unflinching physicality: Job is depicted as an old man, nearly naked, body marked by disease and exposure, expressing both suffering and unbroken spiritual endurance. The influence of Ribera's suffering saints is clear. Exhibited at the Salon of 1880, it made a significant impression, combining realist directness with profound spiritual subject matter at the intersection of Bonnat's two greatest strengths.

Oil on canvas with the most searching physical realism of any Bonnat religious subject. The aging, afflicted body is studied with the same anatomical truth as his living portrait subjects, creating a figure whose spiritual endurance is expressed through rather than despite physical suffering.