From the 16th to the early 20th century, artists prized a rich brown pigment called "mummy brown." The pigment was made by grinding up embalmed Egyptian mummies, both human and feline, and mixing them with pitch and myrrh. It fell out of favor in the early 1900s when artists realized they were painting with human remains, and the supply of mummies eventually ran out.
The Dark Origins of a Studio Staple
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European artists seeking a rich, warm, and highly transparent brown pigment routinely reached for tubes labeled 'mummy brown' or 'caput mortuum.' The color sat comfortably between raw umber and burnt umber, possessing an organic warmth that made it uniquely suited for rendering soft shadows, rich drapery, and subtle flesh tones. What modern observers often find startling is that the name was entirely literal: the pigment was made by harvesting and crushing the embalmed remains of ancient Egyptian humans and animals.
The trade in mummies did not begin with artists, but rather with apothecaries. From the Middle Ages through the early modern period, ground mummy—known in Latin as 'mumia'—was prescribed across Europe as a universal medicine believed to heal everything from ulcers and bone fractures to internal bleeding. The practice grew out of a linguistic confusion involving natural Persian asphaltum, an organic resin prized for healing. When European traders sought natural bitumen, they believed the blackened resin coating Egyptian mummies was the same substance, sparking centuries of mummy harvesting. By the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, color makers realized that the pitch, resins, and decomposed organic matter also produced an exceptional brown glaze for oil paintings.
Composition and Working Qualities
To manufacture the pigment, colourmen imported desiccated mummies, which were broken down, crushed, and finely ground in mortars. The resulting powder contained a variable blend of pitch, asphaltum, myrrh, embalming resins, linen fragments, and skeletal or soft tissue remains. Cat mummies, which were excavated by the hundreds of thousands from Egyptian temple complexes, were processed alongside human remains to meet the steady commercial demand of European paint manufacturers.
In the studio, mummy brown offered distinctive optical qualities that made it a favorite among portraitists and landscape painters. Because it was semi-transparent and warm, artists used it as a glazing layer over lighter underpaintings to create deep, luminous chiaroscuro and atmospheric depth. However, the paint suffered from significant technical flaws. The presence of asphaltum and organic fats meant that mummy brown dried notoriously slowly and unevenly, often causing paint films to crack, wrinkle, or migrate across the canvas over decades, destabilizing the surrounding colors.
From European Salons to Pre-Raphaelite Palettes
Mummy brown was widely used across European academies, with French and British painters incorporating it extensively into historic canvases and portraits. The French painter Martin Drölling famously employed large quantities of the pigment to achieve the deep golden-brown glazes seen in works like 'Interior of a Kitchen.' Other prominent artists, including Eugène Delacroix and various British portraitists, kept tubes of the pigment in standard rotation alongside more conventional mineral earths.
The material was so commonplace in nineteenth-century art supply catalogues that many painters bought it purely for its handling properties without pausing to consider its literal ingredients. Tube paints were an industrial innovation that separated artists from the messy, raw processes of grinding pigments from scratch. As a result, artists often treated names like 'mummy,' 'dragon's blood,' or 'elephant gall' as poetic trade monikers rather than accurate ingredient lists.
The Victorian Awakening and Garden Burials
A well-documented shift in attitude occurred during the late nineteenth century as the true nature of the pigment became widely understood among artists. A famous account involving the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones illustrates the shock felt by many Victorian painters. When Burne-Jones was informed during a Sunday gathering by fellow artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that mummy brown was actually ground-up human beings, he was reportedly horrified. Burne-Jones immediately retrieved his tube of mummy brown from his studio and gave it a ceremonial burial in his garden.
Burne-Jones's reaction reflected a broader cultural transformation. As archaeology modernized and public fascination with ancient Egypt shifted from exploitative novelty to scientific and cultural respect, the casual destruction of human antiquities for art supplies became untenable. The idea of painting portraits using the pulverized flesh of ancient people increasingly struck collectors, artists, and the public as macabre and sacrilegious.
Scarcity, Obsolescence, and Modern Recreations
Beyond changing ethical standards, practical supply constraints sealed the fate of mummy brown. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Egyptian authorities strictly regulated the export of antiquities, drying up the supply chain for European colourmen. Prominent London paint makers, such as C. Roberson and Co., noted that their supplies of raw mummies had essentially run out by the mid-twentieth century, with the firm finally retiring the original formula when their stored materials were exhausted.
Today, paint manufacturers produce a color called 'mummy brown,' but it contains no organic remains. Modern versions are formulated using lightfast and stable synthetic blends of iron oxides, burnt umber, raw umber, and carbon black. These modern tubes offer artists the same warm, semi-transparent glazing properties prized by the old masters, without the chemical instability of asphaltum or the macabre harvesting of archaeological history.
Key takeaways
•Mummy brown was a genuine fine art pigment produced from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries using pulverized Egyptian mummies, asphaltum, and embalming resins.
•The pigment originated from the medicinal trade in 'mumia' and was favored by artists for its rich, warm transparency in glazes and shadow work.
•Technical issues, including poor drying and cracking caused by asphaltum, combined with ethical revulsion and dwindling mummy exports to end its commercial use.
•Contemporary paints carrying the name 'mummy brown' are completely synthetic blends of iron oxides and earth pigments.