Mummy brown
A brown paint made from ground-up Egyptian mummies, sold into the 20th century. Really.
- Made from
- Ground mummies, white pitch and myrrh
- Last supplier
- C. Roberson & Co., London; out of mummies by about 1960
- Famous burial
- Burne-Jones's tube, 1881
Mummy brown was exactly what it sounds like: the remains of Egyptian mummies, human and cat, ground and mixed with white pitch and myrrh. It made a warm, transparent brown between raw and burnt umber, good for glazes and shadows. By 1712 a Paris color shop called 'À la momie' sold paints, varnish and powdered mummy, and a 1797 London guide recommended mummy flesh as the finest brown glaze.
It went with a broader trade. Ground mummy, mumia, was also sold as medicine in early modern Europe. Painters including Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema are thought to have used the pigment, though few paintings have been tested, because the test destroys a sample.
The most famous story is true, as far as we know. In 1881 Edward Burne-Jones learned from Alma-Tadema, who had seen a mummy at his color maker's being ground up, that the name was literal. His wife Georgiana wrote that he insisted on giving his tube a “decent burial there and then” in the garden.
Supplies of mummies and demand both dried up. In 1964 Time reported that London's C. Roberson & Co., the last supplier, had run out a few years before. A Roberson tube survives in Harvard's Forbes Pigment Collection. Today's 'mummy brown' paints are iron-oxide mixes, closer to sepia and umber (see earth pigments).
Swatches
- Mummy brown · transparent glaze (approx.)
- Sepia · a near neighbor
Colors
Sources
- Burne-Jones, G. (1904). Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. Macmillan.
- Woodcock, S. (1996). Body colour: the misuse of mummy. The Conservator 20(1): 87–94.
- Harvard Art Museums, Forbes Pigment Collection.
- Wikipedia, 'Mummy brown'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.