Taupe
- HEX
- #8E7F71
- RGB
- 142 127 113
- HSL
- 29° 11% 50%
- CMYK
- 0 11 20 44
Taupe or Slate?
A brownish grey. Slate is a bluish grey.
Language
Taupe is French for mole, from Latin talpa. It first meant the grey-brown of a mole's fur; an English-language fashion note of 1846, printed in Australia, lists it among the fashionable greys. By the 1930s color standardizers found it had drifted far browner than real mole fur, and today it covers almost any greyish brown.
Kin
- Puce: Another French animal color: taupe is a mole, puce a flea
- Teal: Another color named after an animal
In paintings
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat
- Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet
- Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet
- The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer
- The Fighting Temeraire, J. M. W. Turner
- The Fighting Temeraire, J. M. W. Turner
- The Kiss, Gustav Klimt
- The Scream, Edvard Munch
- Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Taupe' (OED first citation 1911; earlier use 1846)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016) (1930s standardizers and mole fur)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.