Did painters really make paint out of mummies?
For more than a century, a popular brown paint was made from ground-up Egyptian mummies, and one painter held a funeral for his tube.
▶ Start the storyYes. From the mid-18th to the 19th century, European artists used a brown paint called mummy brown, made from the flesh of Egyptian mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. It was a warm, transparent brown, good for shadows and glazes, and a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Eugène Delacroix, Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma-Tadema are among the artists who used it.
The idea wasn't as bizarre to them as it sounds to us. Mummies already had a reputation as medicine: ground mummy was sold to treat everything from toothache to dysentery. By 1712, a Paris art shop called "À la momie" sold paints, varnish and powdered mummy side by side. A London colour guide of 1797 recommended "the flesh of mummy, the most fleshy are the best parts". Demand sometimes outran the supply of real mummies, and dealers occasionally substituted recent corpses.
Many painters simply didn't think about what was in the tube. Burne-Jones assumed "mummy" was just the name of a shade, until his friend Alma-Tadema told him he had seen a mummy in a colour-maker's workshop before it was ground up. Horrified, Burne-Jones buried his tube in the garden. The paint faded out of fashion as mummies grew scarce and artists tired of its poor durability, and by the 1960s its last supplier had run out of mummies.
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Recap
Mummy brown really contained mummies; it disappeared because mummies ran short and the paint faded and cracked.
Surprising fact · Edward Burne-Jones buried his tube of mummy brown in his garden once he learned what it really was.
Connects to
- 🌾 Why did the ancient Egyptians call their country the 'black land'?
- 💙 Why was one blue paint once as expensive as gold?
- Mummy
- Pre raphaelite brotherhood
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.