Mummy brown.—The bituminous substance found in and enveloping Egyptian mummies; it may be considered partly animal and partly bituminous matter.]

[I]nasmuch as from their very nature or origin the various specimens of Mummy-Brown must differ more or less, there is not the least reliance to be placed upon them: one is in the dark as to his materials, and can predict nothing with even ordinary certainty as to the result of their employment. It is therefore that we ourselves, though quite enamored of experiment, have never yet felt the least desire to essay this pigment, seeing nothing to be gained by smearing our canvas with a part perhaps of the wife of Potiphar, that might not be as easily secured by materials less frail and of more sober character.

Mummy brown comes from the catacombs of Egypt. It is the liquid bitumen that was used in embalming, chemically changed by time and mixture with animal remains. Objections to this pigment are sometimes raised on rather novel grounds, though whether they are the result of sentimental reverence or disgust is open to conjecture.

I then placed it [a wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus)] in an open window on a whitish bottom, and the next day it was light brown. At 2 p.m., August 24th, I put it on a jet-black shelf, with black surroundings. Forty-five minutes later it was very dark, nearly mummy brown[…], but darker.

Mummy Browns, from the crushings of Egyptian corpses, for the mortally ill and melancholy.

Mummy brown was a common shade in artists’ colors until 1925, but it cannot be bought from any paint shop today. In 1964 Time magazine reported [“Techniques: The Passing of Mummy Brown”, Time, 2 October 1964] that London colormaker C. Roberson, which for a while had been the only distributor, had run out a few years before. “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere,” managing director Geoffrey Roberson-Park told Time, “but not enough to make any more paint.”

Mummy brown

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Noun

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