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The picture shows a detail of the Flight into Egypt on the right wing of the Dijon Altarpiece.
St Joseph is leading the donkey by the halter, while he pours drink into his mouth from a small keg. He carries a stick over his left shoulder, from which his coat and a small pot with a ladle have been hung. He is wearing a hood and a surcoat held in by a leather belt at the waist. He has slipped his purse under the belt, and his leather boots seem to have been worn out by the long journey he has made on foot. He has a hooked nose, a curly beard and bushy eyebrows.
Joseph hardly corresponds to the conventional idea of a saint at all. Broederlam has portrayed him as a rough working man, a tired labourer weighed down by his heavy clothes. Some have even called him a tramp, and suggested that that it may not be water which he is slaking his thirst, but something stronger. Perhaps such stern jjudgments are themselves merely one reflection of the ambivalent cult that grew up around the figure of Joseph towards the end of the Middle Ages, for it was that time that he began to be openly caricatures, and depicted as a peasant who deserved to be ridiculed rather than revered. What really distinguished Broederlam's Joseph however is the fact that he is the only ordinary man in the whole altarpiece. He marks the first appearance in painting of an irremediably earthbound reality.
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