Colors / Mummy Brown

“Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

Whether measured in handfuls of marine gastropods or bushels of parasitic bugs, countless organisms have been called upon over time to give up their bodies for Art. Sea snails whose purpling mucus dyed royal robes across the centuries from Phoenicia to Rome; tiny insects, gathered in antiquity around the Mediterranean and in Mesoamerica, whose carapaces were crushed to yield vivid carmine for the painter’s palette: such creatures were far from ready-at-hand, and the labor and expertise involved in gathering them and then processing their remains into dyestuff and pigment made them as valuable in their day as precious metals or jewels.

While the nineteenth-century explosion in synthetic colors made the sacrifice of such animals—or for that matter the collection of rare minerals or plants—less necessary, certain pigments remained stubbornly reliant on esoteric natural substances to trigger their particular aesthetic alchemy. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, London printmaker Rudolph Ackermann listed the various tints he sold out of his celebrated shop in the Strand—among familiar hues like azure blue and vermilion, his 1801 inventory also included exotica such as gamboge (produced from the resin of certain evergreens indigenous to Asia), Indian yellow (popularly believed to be made from the urine of cows fed mango leaves), and Egyptian brown, a light tawny used in painting, often as a transparent wash or glaze, as early as the sixteenth century.

Whether Ackermann’s choice of euphemism for this last and most peculiarly compounded of pigments indicated a developed sense of discretion is unclear—in any case, his circumspection was by no means shared by Messers O’Hara and Hoar, paintmakers based in London’s Lime Street, who a century later found themselves so stymied in their attempts to procure the main ingredient of Egyptian brown that they took to advertising in the newspaper for it: “We are badly in want of one at a suitable price. ... It may appear strange to you, but we require our mummy for making colour. Surely a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian monarch may be used for adorning a noble fresco in Westminster Hall or elsewhere without giving offence to the ghost of the departed gentleman or his descendants.” O’Hara and Hoar’s rather more blunt nod toward the vital constituent of Egyptian brown points at its other, more popular name—mummy brown—and its primary component: mummified ancient bodies, ground into powder and then mixed into oil paints, varnishes, or watercolors.

As scholar Sally Woodcock observes in “Body Colour: The Misuse of Mummy,” her 1996 study of the trade between Egyptian tombs and English ateliers, the use of mummy in painting “was probably encouraged by the belief that it contained bitumen.”^[1] Bitumen, a popular paint ingredient, was itself an organic substance produced by the decomposing bodies of plants, algaes, and other creatures and, like mummy, was a staple of the apothecary from medieval times forward. (References to mummy medicine can be found in the writings of the eleventh-century Persian polymath Avicenna, who suggested it be used to treat paralysis and diseases of the liver; over five hundred years later, Paracelsus was an advocate of the use of mummy in balms and tinctures, while his contemporary Ambroise Paré argued against it.) Indeed, the old Arabic word mumiya meant both an “embalmed body” and “bitumen,” and the color and even smell of mummy suggested to many that bitumen, asphaltum, or other terrestrial substances—also prized by painters of the time for the warm dark browns they produced—had been employed by the Egyptians in the mummification process.

By the sixteenth century, large shipments of mummies were already being received in London—the English merchant John Sanderson reported from his home in Cairo in 1586 on the sale of some six hundred pounds of mummy parts to London’s apothecaries who, as Woodcock points out, had a close connection to the color trade at the time, suggesting that the material might well have been used to make both medicine and paint. Recipes for turning cadavers into color can be found from the eighteenth century on: some argue that the finest color is produced by using the muscles and “fleshiest” parts of the mummy, while others advocate for grinding the body whole—bones, wrappings and all—to create what one commentator called “a charming pigment … uniting a peculiar greyness (due to the corpse and its bandages) to the rich brown tone of the pitch or bitumen.”

Despite this long history, it was following Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798 that a trade in mummies truly began to flourish in earnest. Increased tourism to the region found body parts becoming souvenirs—Flaubert famously pocketed a mummy’s foot on a trip to visit Egyptian tombs in 1850 and displayed it in his study for the rest of his life. If contemporary attitudes to these antiquities make such behaviors seem indelicate at best, conventional wisdom at the time toward the plentiful and relatively available mummies made them popular choices not just for personal but for a variety of increasingly industrial uses: they were ground up for garden fertilizer, their wrappings utilized in paper making, and more.

Despite its gruesome origins, this elusive gray-brown was apparently sufficiently charming that a fair number of artists sought it out for their palettes well into the late nineteenth century. It was particularly popular, it seems, among the Pre-Raphaelites: both Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones favored it, at least until the latter discovered that its name was not mere metaphor. As his wife Georgiana recounted in her memoirs, on a visit Alma-Tadema paid to the Burne-Jones studio in 1881, the guest regaled his host with an account of having gone to his paintmaker—probably the leading London firm of Charles Roberson & Co.—to view a mummy prior to its being made into pigment. Although Burne-Jones was initially reluctant to believe his friend’s tale, he was eventually persuaded that his favored hue was in fact principally made of dead bodies, whereupon, his wife reported, he “hastened to the studio and returning with the only tube he had, insisted on our giving it a decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet, and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it.”

While mummy brown maintained a place in the popular imagination into the twentieth century—one 1903 press account claimed that “most of the Royal Academy painters” were using it—by then it was in ultimate decline. Woodcock suggests several reasons for mummy brown’s disappearance, including enforced bans on the exportation of Egyptian mummies, but also a general dissatisfaction—newly acute perhaps given the expanding range of colors made possible with synthetic, chemical compositions—with mummy brown’s technical qualities as a pigment, especially its failure to dry readily and its lack of durability. While mummy brown could nevertheless occasionally be found in paintmakers’ inventories into the twentieth century, a note in an October 1964 issue of Time seems to have announced its final death-knell. According to the short, unsigned article, Geoffrey Roberson-Park, then managing director of Roberson, “regretfully admits that the firm has run out of mummies. ‘We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere,’ he apologized, ‘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.’”