Brown
- HEX
- #7A5230
- RGB
- 122 82 48
- HSL
- 28° 44% 33%
- CMYK
- 0 33 61 52
Language
Bear may simply mean 'the brown one'. Many linguists think early Germanic speakers avoided the animal's real name out of fear and called it by its color instead; Greek arktos and Latin ursus kept the old name. Brown itself comes from a root meaning bright or brown.
Science
Brown isn't in the rainbow. It's dark orange or yellow seen next to brighter things. Light a brown object alone in a dark room and it can look orange. Your brain decides what brown is from the surroundings. See color-constancy and spectrum.
History
Painters once used a brown made of people. Mummy brown was ground from Egyptian mummies. The painter Edward Burne-Jones, learning the truth, gave his tube a funeral in his garden. The London colormen C. Roberson said their last batch came in 1964, when they ran out of mummies. Most browns are safer earth-pigments.
Design
In 2012 researchers asked 1,000 Australian smokers to pick the least appealing color for cigarette packs. They chose Pantone 448 C, a drab dark brown, now required on every pack. UPS went the other way and built a brand on its brown, which it calls Pullman brown. See color-trademarks.
Art
Some browns were traps. Asphaltum, a tarry bitumen brown loved in the 1700s and 1800s, never fully dries: it has wrinkled and cracked paintings by Joshua Reynolds and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. The Impressionists mocked academic 'brown gravy' and tried to banish earth browns altogether.
Culture
For centuries brown was what ordinary people wore: undyed or cheaply dyed wool for peasants and humble friars. After the Reformation, sober browns joined black and grey as respectable colors for men's everyday dress, from the 1500s into the 1800s. Around 1700, about a quarter of the clothes in Paris nobles' estate inventories were brown.
Kin
- Orange: Brown is dark orange, seen against brighter surroundings
- Olive: Australia first called its ugly pack color olive, until olive growers objected
- Umber: The earth pigment behind painters' deepest natural browns
- Sepia: Brown ink from cuttlefish, and the tone of old photographs
In paintings
- The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli
- Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci
- Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh
Sources
- Etymonline, 'brown', 'bear'
- Smithsonian Magazine, 'Ground-up mummies were once an ingredient in paint'; Journal of Art in Society, 'The life and death of mummy brown'
- Wikipedia, 'Pantone 448 C' (GfK Bluemoon research, 2012)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- Gurney, Color and Light (2010)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (2008)
- Jarman, Chroma (1994)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.