Ever since the birth of art, fashion, bodily adornment, tribal differentiation, ritual decoration… we as a species have looked for different colours in the world around us to brighten things up a bit. You name it, we’ve used it, dyes and pigments from roots, vegetables, flowers, ground mud, blood, crushed insects and seashells, squid ink, anything that’ll stain will do, and if the stain lasts, so much the better. We still use a lot of these ancient colours. However, Mummy Brown isn’t one of them.

Particularly prized by the Pre Raphaelites, Mummy Brown, as the name suggests, is a colour made out of the ground remains of Egyptian mummies. The rich brown comes from the chemicals used in the processes of embalming, as practiced in the ancient world, principally bitumen, which substance was considered responsible for the blackening of the remains of these ancient cadavers. The trade dates back centuries, with records of its export and use cropping up from several sources, including Samuel Pepys, in the 16th century, when production was at its peak.

Unsurprisingly, the colour began to fall out of favour towards the beginning of the 20th Century, in part due to greater respect for the field of archaeology, but as much to do with artists realizing where the pigment came from. Edward Burnes-Jones, on discovering that Mummy Brown was not just a fanciful name, immediately had his tube of the stuff interred, with some small ceremony, in his garden. Rudyard Kipling, a friend of Burnes-Jones, followed suit, burying his supply in his yard to try and right the wrongs of its sacrilegious use.

Nevertheless, the pigment remained in production until 1964 when the last supplies of the material used for its production ran out. According to the then managing director of Roberson’s artists colour makers: “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint. We sold our last complete mummy some years ago for, I think, £3. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. We certainly can’t get any more.”

This discovery has somewhat tainted my visits to art galleries as I now wonder how many of them are, literally, public mausoleums, but in researching this article, I have also discovered one more startling fact: that these ground remains were not only used as pigment, but were also employed (and consumed) for medicinal purposes…

References:

http://www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brown.html
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ground-mummies-were-once-ingredient-paint-180950350/
http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/mummy-brown-16th-century-paint-made-ground-mummies-001716