Mummy Brown

It turns out that some of the nineteenth century’s finest artistic glazes were made from the dead. Mummy Brown was precisely what its name implied: a rich pigment produced by grinding down the remains of Egyptian mummies, both human and feline, and mixing them with white pitch and myrrh.

Painters prized the concoction for its transparency and depth. It gave a distinct, warm luminescence to flesh tones, lent weight to shadows, and captured the texture of hair in a way few other earth colors could manage. Pre-Raphaelite masters like Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma-Tadema relied on it to build up their canvases, layering centuries of preserved history directly onto modern art.

Yet the material had a stubborn practical flaw alongside its grim pedigree. Mummy Brown was notoriously unreliable. It struggled to dry properly, and once applied, it had a persistent habit of cracking as it aged.

The pigment's eventual disappearance, however, had less to do with its structural instability and more to do with a simple logistics problem and a sudden surge of conscience. Authentic mummies were a finite resource, and as the supply dwindled, artists also began to learn what, exactly, was in the tube.

Upon discovering the pigment's true composition, Edward Burne-Jones was reportedly so horrified that he took his remaining supply into his garden and buried it. Whether that specific act is historical fact or studio legend matters very little. It captures the precise moment the illusion broke—the instant a luxurious medium ceased to be an artist's tool and became a corpse again.