Mummy Brown: The Pigment Made from Ground Egyptian Mummies

In the 1860s, the painter Edward Burne-Jones walked out into his garden in broad daylight carrying a tube of paint. He had just learned from his friend Lawrence Alma-Tadema that the color called "mummy brown" was made from actual mummies. Burne-Jones, horrified, insisted on giving the tube a decent burial right there in the yard. The anecdote, recorded by Burne-Jones's nephew Rudyard Kipling, captures the strangeness of a pigment that European painters used for over three centuries without much thought, and then abandoned in disgust once they understood what it was.

Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or caput mortuum (Latin for "dead head"), was a brown pigment made from the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies. The mummified flesh, mixed with the bitumen and resins used in embalming, was pulverized and combined with white pitch and myrrh to produce a rich, transparent brown that sat between burnt umber and raw umber in tone. The pigment was used in European painting from at least the sixteenth century until its discontinuation in 1964, when the London colormaker C. Roberson and Company ran out of mummies.

This entry covers what mummy brown was, how it was made, its history from medieval medicine to Victorian painting, which artists used it, and why it disappeared.

What Was Mummy Brown and How Was It Made?

Mummy brown was made by grinding mummified human remains into a powder and mixing it with binding agents. The pigment was not simply crushed bone or dried flesh. Egyptian mummification involved treating the body with natron (a natural salt mixture), wrapping it in linen, and applying resins and bitumen to preserve it. The resulting material, when ground, produced a complex mixture of organic and inorganic compounds: degraded proteins, bituminous resins, waxes, and mineral salts from the embalming process.

The pigment was sold as a paint, not a dry powder. Colormakers like C. Roberson in London purchased mummies, ground them, and mixed the powder with oil and other ingredients to produce a paint with good transparency and a warm, slightly reddish-brown tone. The bitumen content gave the paint a glossy, resinous quality that made it useful for glazes and shadows.

A 2005 study published in Studies in Conservation analyzed a nineteenth-century mummy pigment sample from the Hafkenscheid Collection using direct temperature-resolved mass spectrometry and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. The analysis revealed a complex composition: pre-treated asphalt, mastic resin, conifer resin, linseed oil, beeswax, and a fat of possible human origin. The researchers noted that while the unusual fat and beeswax were consistent with mummy-derived material, a definitive connection to Egyptian mummies could not be proven. Read the study at Taylor & Francis.

Origins and History

From Medicine to Paint

The use of mummy brown grew out of a medieval medical practice. From the early medieval period, Europeans consumed preparations of mummy, called "mumia," as a treatment for ailments ranging from epilepsy to stomach disorders. The Arabic word mumiya originally referred to a waxy substance that seeped from mummified bodies, which was believed to have medicinal properties. European apothecaries sold powdered mummy alongside other remedies, and early artist pigments were commonly derived from medicines sold in the same shops.

The transition from medicine to pigment is unclear in its exact dating. A 1594 document by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo mentions the use of mummy pigment and credits an earlier source from the twelfth century. The earliest concrete record of mummy brown as a commercial paint comes from 1712, when an art supply shop called "A la Momie" opened in Paris, selling paints, varnish, powdered mummy, and incense.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Mummy brown became widely popular from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. In 1797, a Compendium of Colours published in London declared that the finest brown, used as a glaze by Benjamin West (president of the Royal Academy), "is the flesh of mummy, the most fleshy are the best parts." In 1809, the British chemist George Field recorded receiving a delivery of mummy from Sir William Beechey for the purpose of making pigment. Field described the material as arriving "in a mass, containing and permeating rib-bone etc. of a strong smell resembling Garlic and Ammonia, grinds easily, works rather pasty, unaffected by damp and foul air."

The pigment was mass-produced across Europe. A 1904 advertisement in the Daily Mail by C. Roberson read: "We require a mummy for making colour. Surely a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian monarch may be used for adorning a noble fresco without giving offence to the ghost of the departed gentlemen or his descendants." Read more at Harvard Art Museums.

Decline and Discontinuation

By the end of the nineteenth century, mummy brown fell from popularity for several reasons. The supply of quality mummies had diminished, the pigment's permanence was questionable, and bad press about its origins discouraged artists. Sally Woodcock, a conservator and historian at the Roberson Archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has argued that mummy brown "can be blamed in part for the disrupted surfaces which characterise many British paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." The bitumen in the pigment caused cracking and wrinkling as it aged.

By 1915, demand had slowed enough that one London colorman claimed he could satisfy his customers for twenty years from a single mummy. C. Roberson discontinued mummy brown in 1964. The managing director, Geoffrey Roberson-Park, told Time magazine: "We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint." Read more at National Geographic.

Key Artists and Works

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

Delacroix is the most famous painter associated with mummy brown. His Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre) is widely believed to contain mummy brown, based on Delacroix's known use of the pigment. The warm, transparent shadows in the painting's lower portion, where the fallen figures lie among rubble, have the characteristic tone of mummy brown. Delacroix used the pigment for its transparency and depth in glazes, though the bitumen content has contributed to surface cracking in some of his works.

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)

Burne-Jones, associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, used mummy brown before learning its origin. His The Beguiling of Merlin (1874, Lady Lever Art Gallery) contains brown passages that may include mummy brown, though definitive identification is difficult without destructive testing. The story of Burne-Jones burying his tube of mummy brown in the garden, told by Rudyard Kipling, is one of the most famous anecdotes in pigment history.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

Alma-Tadema, known for his paintings of classical antiquity, was a customer at C. Roberson during the period when the firm was grinding mummies. Sally Woodcock notes that Alma-Tadema saw mummy parts in the shop and that he was the one who informed Burne-Jones of the pigment's true nature. Alma-Tadema painted Egyptian scenes, and Woodcock suggests it would be interesting to determine whether he was "using mummies to paint mummies."

Benjamin West (1738-1820)

West, the American-born painter who served as president of the Royal Academy, was cited in the 1797 Compendium of Colours as using mummy brown as a glazing pigment. West's large historical and religious paintings would have benefited from the pigment's transparency in shadow passages, though the long-term stability issues of bitumen-containing paint have affected the condition of some of his works.

Identification and Conservation Challenges

Identifying mummy brown in specific paintings is nearly impossible without destructive testing. The pigment's organic components are similar to other bitumen-based paints, and mass spectrometry can detect the characteristic compounds but cannot definitively prove that the material came from a mummy rather than from a natural bitumen source. Conservators suspect mummy brown's presence based on the painting's date, the artist's known materials, and the visual characteristics of the brown passages.

The pigment's instability is a conservation problem. The bitumen in mummy brown causes the paint film to remain soft and mobile for years after application, leading to wrinkling, cracking, and darkening. Paintings by Delacroix and other nineteenth-century artists show the characteristic "alligator" cracking pattern associated with bitumen-containing paint. Woodcock's research at the Fitzwilliam Museum has documented these effects in Roberson's client paintings.

Related Pigments and Terms

Mummy brown is related to other bitumen-based pigments, including asphaltum, which was used by painters for similar transparent brown glazes. The pigment connects to the broader history of underpainting and glazing, where transparent darks were built up over lighter passages. It also relates to chiaroscuro, since the deep, warm browns of mummy brown were used to create dramatic light-dark contrasts. The Pre-Raphaelite painters who used mummy brown were part of a broader movement explored in our entry on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. For more on how pigments age and change, read our post on how to read a painting.

See Mummy Brown in Person

The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums holds a tube of mummy brown pigment purchased from C. Roberson in the early 1900s. It is one of the few surviving samples of the genuine pigment, displayed alongside the collection's 2,500 other pigments. The Louvre holds Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, where mummy brown is believed to contribute to the warm shadows. The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool holds Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin.

Modern "mummy brown" paints sold under that name are synthetic formulations, typically made from iron oxide pigments, and contain no mummy material. The genuine pigment is no longer produced. For more on the strange history of pigments, read our entries on underpainting and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or explore our guide on how to read a painting.