Painters once used a brown made from ground-up Egyptian mummies.
Mummy brown was exactly what it sounds like: mummified flesh mixed with pitch and myrrh. It was popular with European painters for about two centuries. When Edward Burne-Jones learned the name wasn't a metaphor, he gave his tube a solemn burial in his garden.
Before it was a paint, mummy was a medicine. For centuries Europeans took materials derived from Egyptian mummies for complaints from toothache to dysentery. The earliest firm record of the pigment comes from 1712, when a Paris colour shop called À la momie sold paints, varnish and powdered mummy. It was made from the remains of Egyptian mummies, and sometimes of mummies from the Canary Islands, human and feline, ground with white pitch and myrrh.
Artists valued it as a warm, transparent brown, between burnt and raw umber, good for glazes, shadows and flesh. It was fashionable from the mid-18th century through the 19th and a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites. Painters thought to have used it include Eugène Delacroix, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Martin Drolling and Burne-Jones, though few paintings have been tested, because the test destroys a sample.
The trade had a grim underside. Demand sometimes outran the supply of genuine mummies, and the bodies of recently dead enslaved people or criminals were occasionally substituted. In 1881, Burne-Jones, who had assumed the name only described a shade, was told by Alma-Tadema that he had seen a mummy in a colourman's workshop waiting to be ground up. According to his wife, Burne-Jones insisted on giving his tube a 'decent burial' on the spot.
It was not a good paint anyway. It faded, cracked when used alone, and its fats and ammonia could affect neighbouring colours. By 1915 one London supplier said a single mummy would meet his customers' demand for twenty years, and in 1964 Time magazine reported that the last maker, C. Roberson, had run out. The 'mummy brown' sold today is made of iron oxides and clay.
Source: Wikipedia — Mummy brown · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
