Mummy Brown

What color is mummy brown?

The story of mummy brown

Mummy brown is not a metaphor. It was ground Egyptian mummies, and painters bought it for two hundred years.

Europeans ate mummies as medicine, mummia, for centuries before they painted with them. The first firm record of the paint is from 1712, when a Paris shop called A la Momie sold paints, varnish and powdered mummy. The recipe was flesh, human or cat, from Egypt or the Canary Islands, ground with white pitch and myrrh into a transparent brown between raw and burnt umber. A London handbook of 1797 said the finest glazing brown used by Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy, "is the flesh of mummy, the most fleshy are the best parts."

In 1809 the chemist George Field logged a delivery of mummy from the painter William Beechey: a mass with rib bone in it, smelling of garlic and ammonia. Delacroix is said to have used it, and by 1849 it was quite in vogue. When Egyptian mummies ran short, more recent corpses, of enslaved people or executed criminals, went into the grinder, and after the French Revolution hearts of French kings from the abbey of Saint-Denis were made into paint. Sounds like a gothic novel. It is a supply chain.

The Pre-Raphaelite circle loved it, and the best story about it comes from a Sunday lunch in 1881. Edward Burne-Jones and his family were in the orchard of their London house with Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who mentioned he had been invited to see a mummy at his colorman's before it was ground down. Burne-Jones refused to believe it, said the name "must be only borrowed to describe a particular shade of brown," then fetched his only tube and insisted on "decent burial there and then." A hole was bored in the grass and a daisy planted on top. His wife Georgiana wrote it down. His nephew Rudyard Kipling, a child in that house, remembered a tube of mummy brown buried as well: the uncle announcing it was made of dead Pharaohs, and that half a century on he could still "drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lies."

By 1900 mummies were scarce, the paint faded, and the story had become bad press. In 1901 the chemist Arthur Church relayed a London colorman's claim that one mummy supplied his customers for twenty years. In 1964 C. Roberson of London, the last maker, told Time magazine it had run out: a few odd limbs about the place, but not enough for another batch, and the last whole mummy sold years earlier for about three pounds. A tube bought from Roberson around 1900 sits in Harvard's Forbes Pigment Collection.

What you buy today under the name is a blend of earths, kaolin, quartz, goethite and hematite, with the two iron minerals doing the coloring. It is ochre with a ghoulish label, and it is permanent. The color was never the point. It was a middling brown that faded, and umber did the job better and came out of a hillside. People were paying for the story, which is still the only interesting thing about it. Mix the color yourself and keep the story.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix mummy brown

You can mix mummy brown in ten seconds, and the tube makers do the same thing with earths. Start with burnt sienna and add a little raw umber until the orange goes quiet; that lands between the two umbers, where the original sat.

Brown and blue is the pairing that matters. Mummy brown was sold as a glazing color for shadows, and a transparent brown floated over a dry wash still does that better than anything opaque. A touch of indigo turns it into a warm shadow gray, and you can get there without a single Pharaoh.

Using mummy brown in watercolor

Use it where the old painters used it: shadows, flesh in shade, wood and leather. A transparent brown is a shadow color by nature, because the paper keeps glowing through it, and the modern earth version does this well.

Glazing is the technique. Let the first wash dry completely, then float a thin, watery brown over the part that should sit back. The value drops and the color underneath stays alive. The original was bought for exactly this job.

It pairs with blues. Beside a cool blue-gray it looks warmer than it is, and mixed with one it gives you every stone and shadow gray in a landscape. Beside a bright orange it disappears.

One thing I learned the hard way with transparent browns: lay them down and leave them. Scrub a glaze while it is damp and you lift the layer underneath and get mud. If it goes wrong, let it dry and try again on top.

Mummy brown vs burnt umber (and Van Dyke brown)

Burnt umber is the closest living relative: a natural earth of iron and manganese, roasted until part of the iron turns to red hematite. Mummy brown sat between raw and burnt umber in tint, a touch yellower than the burnt, more transparent and nothing like as permanent.

Van Dyke brown is the other brown with a dubious past. The original, Cassel earth, was dug from peat and soil near Kassel and Cologne, and it fades: technical studies put its lightfastness at poor to medium. Modern versions copy it with an asphalt-like black and iron oxide, and it runs cooler and darker than mummy brown.

All three are shadow browns that came out of the ground, one way or another. If burnt umber is a hillside, Van Dyke brown is a bog, and mummy brown is a tomb.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.