The Palette/brown/Taken from an animal

Mummy brown

Made from ground-up Egyptian mummies (human and animal) and sold in London art shops until about 1964, when the supplier ran out of mummies.

Also called Egyptian brown · caput mortuum (confusingly)

Hex: #6B4A35
RGB: 107, 74, 53
First used: 16th century, popular in the 18th and 19th
From: Egypt, ground up in London and Paris

What it is

Ground mummified remains: bone, bitumen, resin and tissue. Composition varied entirely with what was in the crate.

How it is made

Mummified remains were broken up and ground, with the bitumen and resins used in embalming doing most of the colouring. Because the bitumen content varied enormously, so did the pigment: some batches were a warm transparent glazing brown, others were an unusable tarry sludge.

The trade grew out of the medieval European market in mummia as a medicine, powdered mummy was sold by apothecaries for centuries on the theory that the embalming preparations were therapeutic. Once you have an established import trade in ground-up human remains, selling some of it to painters is not a large step.

Mummy brown, Historical pigment made with mummified remains. Wikipedia's description, not ours.

The history

This is not a legend and it is not exaggerated. C. Roberson & Co of London sold it, and in 1964 their managing director told Time magazine that they might have odd bits of mummy somewhere but not enough to make more colour, and that they had sold their last complete mummy some years before. That interview is the usual citation for the end of the trade, and it is about as blunt a primary source as you could ask for.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones is said to have been told what was in his tube, been appalled, and held a ceremonial burial for it in his garden. His wife Georgiana recorded the episode. Whether the account is exact or improved in the telling, the reaction it describes is the interesting part: the material had been in use for three hundred years and the horror only arrived when somebody said the word out loud.

Painters also disliked it for technical reasons. Bituminous pigments never dry properly, they crack, and they drag down anything painted over them, so mummy brown was suspected of damage as well as being macabre. A number of nineteenth-century paintings with badly cracked brown passages are blamed on it, sometimes fairly.

Where it is used

Glazing, shadows and flesh tones in European painting, chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modern tubes labelled mummy brown are mixtures of iron oxides and are a colour name only.

It belongs in a design library for one reason: it is the clearest case of a supply chain nobody examined. Everybody in it (the exporters, the apothecaries, the colourmen, the painters) was doing normal business, and the question of what the material actually was simply did not get asked for three centuries. That failure mode has not gone anywhere. It is worth asking, about any material in your own work, what it is and who it came from, and being prepared for the answer to be uncomfortable.

Go and look at it

Cracked brown passages in 19th-century painting
Conservation reports more than labels
Bituminous browns are one of the standard suspects for wide drying cracks.
C. Roberson & Co's records
Hamilton Kerr Institute archive, Cambridge
The colourman's own papers. The trade is documented, not rumoured.

How it behaves

Made of: Ground mummified remains: bone, bitumen, resin and tissue. Composition varied entirely with what was in the crate.
Opacity: Transparent. It stains rather than covers, so it can be glazed over another colour.
Lightfastness: Moderate. It will move, noticeably, within decades, faster in thin films and tints.

Bituminous, so it never fully dries, cracks badly, and damages layers above it.
Composition varied wildly between batches. No two were the same colour.
The ethical objection now would be decisive, and was not raised for three hundred years.

The numbers

All derived from the hex, never typed beside it

HEX: #6B4A35; What a browser and a design file want.
RGB: 107, 74, 53; The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
HSL: 23°, 34%, 31%; Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
CMYK: 0, 31, 50, 58; Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
LAB: 35, 11, 18; Perceptual. L* of 35 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.

This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Mummy brown is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.

Where it sits on the wheel

Hue 23°

Its opposite, by the diagram

#6B4A35

#35566B

The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.

Lighter and darker

Towards white

#6B4A35

#816553

#978072

#B5A59A

#D3C9C2

#E9E4E1

Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.

Towards black

#6B4A35

#5B3F2D

#4B3425

#36251B

#201610

#100B08

Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.

Can you set type on it

Handgloves

White on it
7.91:1 · AAA

Handgloves

Black on it
2.66:1 · Fails

Handgloves

It on paper
7.50:1 · AAA

Handgloves

It on ink
2.31:1 · Fails

4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.