Mummy Brown

Mummy brown

Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or Caput Mortuum, is a shade of brown with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. Its bituminous pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. Mummy brown was extremely popular from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, predominantly with Western European artists. However, fresh supplies of mummies diminished, and artists were less satisfied with the pigment's permanency and finish. By 1915, demand had significantly declined. Suppliers ceased to offer it by the middle of the twentieth century.

Mummy

A mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay further if kept in cool and dry conditions. Some authorities restrict the use of the term to bodies deliberately embalmed with chemicals, but the use of the word to cover accidentally desiccated bodies goes back to at least the early 17th century.

Brown

Brown is a color. It can be thought as a darker, typically desaturated shade of orange, and can often be produced by combining red and yellow with another color, namely blue.

mummy brown

Noun

1. A brown pigment originally prepared from the ground-up remains of Egyptian animal or human mummies mixed with bitumen, etc. .mw-parser-output .defdate{font-size:smaller}
2. The colour of this pigment, a variable brown intermediate between raw umber and burnt umber.