Mummy brown
Based on Wikipedia: Mummy brown
In 1881, the painter Edward Burne-Jones held a small funeral in his garden. The deceased was not a pet or a beloved relative. It was a tube of paint.
Burne-Jones had just learned a disturbing fact about one of his favorite pigments, a rich brown color with wonderful transparency that sat somewhere between burnt umber and raw umber on the spectrum. The color was called "mummy brown," and until that moment, he had assumed the name was merely poetic—a fanciful way of describing a particular shade that happened to evoke ancient Egypt.
It was not poetic at all. It was literal.
The Recipe
Mummy brown was made from actual mummies. The flesh of ancient Egyptians—preserved for thousands of years in the expectation of an eternal afterlife—was ground up, mixed with white pitch and myrrh, and sold to artists across Europe. The resulting pigment had a warm vibrancy that painters found irresistible. It was perfect for glazing, for shadows, for flesh tones. The Pre-Raphaelites, that group of Victorian artists who sought to return to the detailed style of Italian painters before Raphael, counted it among their favorite colors.
The irony is almost too perfect: using dead human bodies to paint living ones.
When Burne-Jones expressed his horror and disbelief to his colleague Lawrence Alma-Tadema, hoping for reassurance that the name was just marketing, he received the opposite. Alma-Tadema had personally visited his colourman's workshop—the Victorian term for a supplier of artistic materials—and had seen a mummy before it was ground into powder. There was no doubt about it.
Burne-Jones insisted on giving his tube of mummy brown what he called "a decent burial there and then." His wife Georgiana recorded the scene in her memoirs. One imagines the other artists in attendance shifting uncomfortably, wondering about their own paint boxes.
From Medicine to Art
Before European artists discovered that pulverized mummies made excellent paint, European doctors had already discovered that pulverized mummies made excellent medicine. Or so they believed.
The medicinal use of mummy parts predates the artistic use by centuries. From roughly the twelfth century onward, materials derived from mummies were prescribed for an astonishing range of ailments: toothaches, stomach problems, dysentery, general malaise. The logic, such as it was, drew on the ancient idea that the preservative substances used in mummification must contain powerful healing properties. If these materials could preserve a body for millennia, surely they could cure what ailed the living.
This was, of course, complete nonsense from a medical standpoint. But it created a robust trade in mummy parts that would last for hundreds of years. When artists began seeking the pigment in the eighteenth century, the supply chain was already well established.
The earliest documented artistic use comes from 1712, when a Parisian shop called "À la momie"—literally "At the Mummy"—began selling paints, varnish, and powdered mummy to artists. The shop name alone tells you something about the casual attitude toward this peculiar ingredient. It would be like opening a store today called "At the Ground-Up Ancient Corpse" and expecting customers to take it in stride.
By 1797, a London guide to colors was recommending mummy brown specifically, noting that the finest version—as used by Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy—came from "the flesh of mummy, the most fleshy are the best parts." One can only imagine the quality control conversations at the colourman's workshop.
The Problem of Supply
Here is where the story takes an even darker turn, if such a thing is possible.
Mummy brown became extremely popular. By 1849, it was described as being "quite in vogue" among painters. But there was a fundamental constraint on the business model: ancient Egypt had produced a finite number of mummies. The supply of genuine Egyptian mummies could not keep pace with European artistic demand.
The market responded as markets do. If you cannot source the authentic product, you substitute.
Contemporary corpses—the recently dead rather than the anciently preserved—began appearing in the supply chain. The bodies of enslaved people and executed criminals were sometimes processed into pigment. The distinction between a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian and a recently deceased person became, from a commercial perspective, a technicality.
Perhaps the most macabre substitution occurred in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The hearts of French kings, which had been preserved at the Abbey of Saint-Denis as objects of veneration, were seized and allegedly ground up for paint. The monarchs who had ruled by divine right were democratized into tubes of artistic pigment, their remains spread across canvases throughout Europe.
Not all mummy brown came from humans, either. The Guanche people of the Canary Islands had their own mummification traditions, and their remains entered the European pigment trade as well. So did mummified cats, which ancient Egyptians had preserved in enormous numbers as religious offerings.
The Decline
The end of mummy brown came gradually, driven by a combination of practical and ethical concerns.
On the practical side, the pigment had real problems. It exhibited poor permanence, meaning it faded over time. When used alone, without mixing it into oil paints, it had a tendency to crack. The composition was maddeningly inconsistent from batch to batch—not surprising, given that the raw material was literally whatever mummy happened to be available. Worse, the pigment contained ammonia and particles of fat that could react badly with other colors on the palette. A painting made with mummy brown might slowly degrade in ways that were difficult to predict.
On the ethical side, the Burne-Jones garden burial represented a growing discomfort among artists with the idea of painting in human remains. This squeamishness took a remarkably long time to develop—mummy brown had been in widespread use for over a century before anyone seems to have objected publicly—but once it began, it spread.
By 1915, demand had fallen so dramatically that one London colourman claimed he could satisfy all his customers' requests for twenty years from a single Egyptian mummy. The same supply that had once been devoured by the market now sat gathering dust.
The last known commercial supplier of genuine mummy brown was C. Roberson, a London colourmaker. In 1964, Time magazine reported that Roberson had finally run out of mummies a few years earlier. The company had literally exhausted its inventory of ancient corpses. No more would be forthcoming.
Today, a tube of original mummy brown purchased from Roberson in the early 1900s sits on display at the Forbes Pigment Collection of the Harvard Art Museum. It is one of the few surviving examples of a pigment that can no longer be made—not because we have forgotten the recipe, but because we have, at long last, run out of bodies.
What Remains
You can still buy something called "mummy brown" today. Modern versions contain no human remains whatsoever. Instead, they are composed of kaolin (a type of clay), quartz, and iron-containing minerals called goethite and hematite. The hematite and goethite, which typically make up about sixty percent of the modern pigment, determine the color. More hematite produces a redder shade; different proportions yield colors ranging from yellow to dark violet, the latter sometimes marketed as "mummy violet."
The name has become purely historical, a callback to the bizarre original recipe. Artists who squeeze modern mummy brown onto their palettes are using an earthy mineral mixture that ancient Egyptians would not have recognized at all.
As for the paintings made with the original pigment, most remain untested. Definitively identifying mummy brown in a historical painting requires destructive analysis—you have to remove a sample of the paint and subject it to chemical examination. Museums are understandably reluctant to chip away at masterpieces to satisfy curiosity about their gruesome ingredients.
Still, art historians have compiled a list of works that probably contain mummy brown based on their visual characteristics. The suspects include Edward Burne-Jones's The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon—yes, even Burne-Jones used it before his horrified conversion—Martin Drolling's Interior of a Kitchen, and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, one of the most famous images of the French Revolution.
Think about that for a moment. One of the defining images of modern democracy, of the people rising up to claim their rights, may have been painted using ground-up human bodies. Liberty leads the people across a canvas that might contain the remains of the enslaved and executed.
The Broader Trade
Mummy brown was just one manifestation of Europe's centuries-long obsession with Egyptian mummies. The trade in mummy parts for medicine, art, and simple curiosity was so extensive that it fundamentally altered the archaeological record. Countless mummies that might have provided insights into ancient Egyptian life, death, and culture were instead destroyed—eaten as medicine, ground into paint, unwrapped at Victorian dinner parties for entertainment.
The mummy trade also raises uncomfortable questions about how we think about human remains across time and culture. The ancient Egyptians preserved their dead with elaborate care precisely because they believed the physical body was necessary for the afterlife. The entire point of mummification was to protect the body forever. Instead, European demand turned those carefully preserved bodies into commodities, consumed and destroyed by cultures that the ancient Egyptians could never have imagined.
There is something darkly appropriate about the specific use of mummies for paint. Art is, in part, about preserving moments and making them last. The Egyptians preserved their dead to make them last. European artists ground up those preserved dead to create images they hoped would last. Preservation consuming preservation in the service of preservation.
The Color Itself
Setting aside its origins, what was mummy brown actually like as a color?
Artists who used it praised its transparency, which made it excellent for glazing—the technique of applying thin, translucent layers of paint over dried underlayers to create depth and luminosity. The warm brown worked well for shadows and flesh tones, areas where a rich, organic quality was desirable.
The color sat between burnt umber and raw umber on the brown spectrum. Burnt umber is created by heating raw umber, which intensifies and warms the color. Raw umber is cooler and more greenish. Mummy brown occupied a middle ground, warm but not as intensely so as burnt umber, with a vibrancy that artists found distinctive.
Whether any of these qualities actually derived from the human remains in the mixture, as opposed to the pitch and myrrh and whatever else the colourmen added, is impossible to say. Perhaps mummy brown was simply a marketing triumph, a pigment that achieved its reputation partly through the exotic horror of its ingredients. Perhaps artists convinced themselves they could detect the human essence in the color because they knew it was there.
Or perhaps there really was something unique about painting in powdered mortality, some quality that no mineral substitute has ever quite replicated.
A Note on Caput Mortuum
Mummy brown is sometimes confused with another pigment called caput mortuum, also known as cardinal purple. The confusion is understandable: "caput mortuum" is Latin for "dead head" or "worthless remains," and the term was sometimes used as an alternative name for mummy brown.
However, true caput mortuum is a different substance entirely. It is an iron oxide pigment, similar to the modern synthetic mummy brown, with a deep purple-brown color. The name comes from alchemy, where it referred to the worthless residue left over after a substance had been distilled or otherwise processed. Alchemists considered it the final, exhausted state of matter, useful for nothing.
The name stuck as a color term even after alchemy faded from respectability. Today, caput mortuum remains in use as a pigment name, though the "dead head" it refers to is entirely metaphorical. No actual heads, dead or otherwise, are involved in its manufacture.
The Lesson
What should we make of mummy brown today?
One response is simple disgust. The idea of grinding up human bodies for paint is revolting by contemporary standards, and the fact that our artistic ancestors did it routinely does not make it less so. Burne-Jones's garden funeral was the correct response, however belated.
Another response is to recognize mummy brown as a window into a fundamentally different relationship with death, human remains, and the distant past. For centuries, European culture treated Egyptian mummies as commodities—exotic, valuable, collectible, consumable. They were objects, not people. The moral weight of disturbing human remains, which we now take for granted, simply did not apply in the same way.
This is not to excuse the trade but to understand it. The artists who used mummy brown were not, by the standards of their time and place, doing anything particularly scandalous. They were using a commercially available product that happened to contain a very unusual ingredient. The scandal, such as it was, lay in the supply chain rather than the palette.
Perhaps the most honest response is ambivalence. The paintings made with mummy brown include genuine masterpieces, works of lasting beauty and significance. If Liberty Leading the People does contain ground-up human remains, does that change how we see the painting? Should it? The art exists independent of its grotesque ingredients, and yet the ingredients are now part of the art's history, inseparable from it.
Burne-Jones buried his tube of mummy brown because he could not bear to use it once he knew what it contained. But he did not destroy the paintings he had already made with it. Those remained in the world, their human content invisible, their beauty undimmed.
The color is gone now, exhausted along with its supply of bodies. But its ghost lingers in museums around the world, in paintings whose warm brown shadows may or may not contain the remains of ancient Egyptians, enslaved people, executed criminals, and French kings. We will probably never know for certain which works contain the real thing. The dead have been mixed so thoroughly into the art that separating them is no longer possible.
Perhaps that is fitting. The Egyptians wanted their bodies to last forever. In a way, they got their wish.