The Paint Made From Ground-Up Mummies

For roughly four centuries — from the Renaissance into the modern era — European artists used a pigment made from ground‑up mummified remains.

The colour was called Mummy Brown.

This was not a poetic name for a shade. It was brown paint made from the powdered flesh, bone and wrappings of embalmed people — mixed with resins like pitch and myrrh, ground fine and sold in tubes and pots in art‑supply shops across London, Paris and Berlin.

It was popular. It was reliable. It was made of human beings.

The Horror

Mummy Brown was prized for its warm, transparent, slightly reddish tone — somewhere between raw umber and burnt umber, with a glow that was hard to match using purely mineral or plant‑based pigments. It was excellent for glazing, for deep shadows and — with an irony almost no one seems to have remarked on at the time — for rendering flesh.

The pigment found its way into the work of major 18th and 19th‑century painters. The Pre‑Raphaelites are often cited among its users. Edward Burne‑Jones had it on his palette. Lawrence Alma‑Tadema, famous for his meticulously detailed classical scenes, was a regular customer of London colourmen who supplied it. Eugène Delacroix is frequently mentioned as another artist who likely used it in some works.

Many of these artists either didn’t know or didn’t fully believe what the name meant. “Mummy Brown” sounded like a romantic label for a colour, not a literal ingredient list. The truth was printed on the tube — and still dismissed as legend.

One well‑known moment of revelation came over Sunday lunch. Burne‑Jones was dining with Alma‑Tadema when talk turned to pigments. Alma‑Tadema mentioned that he had recently been invited to his colourman’s workshop to see a real mummy before it was ground into paint.

Burne‑Jones refused to accept it. He insisted the name was metaphorical, a fancy brand name for a brown manufactured by ordinary means. Alma‑Tadema calmly assured him it was not: the pigment really was made from mummified bodies.

Burne‑Jones’s wife Georgiana later wrote about what happened next. Shocked, he left the table, hurried to his studio, fetched the only tube of Mummy Brown he owned and returned to the garden. There, he insisted they give it a “decent burial.” A hole was dug in the grass, the tube was placed inside and covered, and one of their daughters planted a daisy over the spot as a marker.

Alma‑Tadema reportedly found the whole episode amusing. He did not bury his own paint. He just kept painting.

The Modern Relic

Production of Mummy Brown continued well into the 20th century. The London colour‑makers C. Roberson & Co., one of the most important suppliers to British artists, stocked a pigment under that name until the mid‑1900s. By the early 1960s, they had finally stopped offering it.

The reason was not a sudden moral awakening. It was supply.

In a widely quoted remark, Geoffrey Roberson, then managing director, explained that they had discontinued Mummy Brown because they simply no longer had enough raw material. “We might have a few odd limbs lying about somewhere,” he said, “but not enough to make any more paint.”

The colour effectively went extinct because the company ran out of mummies.

Over the centuries, demand had also led to fraud and substitution. When genuine Egyptian mummies became scarce, traders sometimes used more recent corpses — including bodies of the poor, criminals or enslaved people — treated with bitumen to resemble ancient remains before being sold for medicine or pigment. “Mummy” was less a single person and more a category of exploited dead.

A surviving tube of original Mummy Brown, purchased from Roberson in the early 20th century, now sits in the Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums. It rests in a glass case among minerals, plants and insect‑based colours. The label is clear about the name. The brown inside is warm, rich and translucent — a painter’s dream for skin and shadow.

It was somebody once.

The tube has never been opened. The person or people inside have never been identified. They were embalmed in the hope of eternal preservation, dug up centuries later, ground to dust, mixed with oil and squeezed into a small metal tube that now lies inert in a museum drawer.

The daisy Burne‑Jones planted over his buried tube has, of course, long vanished. The idea that the paint deserved a funeral has not.

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