Umber
- HEX
- #635147
- RGB
- 99 81 71
- HSL
- 21° 16% 33%
- CMYK
- 0 18 28 61
Umber or Sepia?
Darker and greyer than sepia.
Language
No one is sure where umber's name comes from. Most color historians lean toward Latin umbra or Italian ombra, shadow, which suits a pigment painters reach for in the shadows. The old link to Umbria is weaker, since Europe got most of its umber from the eastern Mediterranean. French calls it terre d'ombre.
History
Umber is an iron earth rich in manganese oxide, which makes it darker than ochre and sienna and helps oil paint dry fast. Most of it comes from Cyprus. Roasted, it becomes burnt umber, a color name in English since 1650. See earth-pigments.
Art
Umber is the color of Rembrandt's darkness. In his later years he worked from a small palette of cheap, stable earths, and umber built the dark grounds around the lit faces of his late self-portraits. Caravaggio's Nativity of 1609, stolen from Palermo in 1969 and never recovered, picked its figures out of a muddy umber dark.
Kin
- Sienna: Its lighter partner in every painter's box of earths
- Ochre: The earth pigment trio: ochre, sienna, umber
- Sepia: Brown from the earth versus brown from the sea
In paintings
- The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck
- Houses of Parliament, Sunset, Claude Monet
- The Japanese Footbridge, Claude Monet
- The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer
- The Fighting Temeraire, J. M. W. Turner
- The Kiss, Gustav Klimt
- The Scream, Edvard Munch
- Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Umber' (manganese; Cyprus; burnt umber 1650)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color (2019)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.