The Color of Mummies

For several centuries, European artists use a pigment called "Mummy Brown," made from remains of ground Egyptian mummies mixed with resins and oils. The color, appreciated for its transparent browns, circulated in workshops without many painters knowing exactly what it really contained.

From the 18th century, and even more in the 19th, Europe becomes passionate about ancient Egypt, an Egyptomania that gains architecture, collections, performances, and even painters' materials. It's in this climate that Mummy Brown appears, a pigment obtained from organic materials drawn from human or animal mummies, reduced to powder then mixed with various binders.

The color seduced certain artists through its transparency, depth, and warm tonalities, ideal for glazes. The commerce surrounding it nevertheless rested on a mix of truth and exaggeration: if some preparations indeed contained mummy fragments, others made do with resins or bitumens vaguely associated with Egypt.

In the 19th century, several painters discover with unease the exact origin of the product, and it's said that Edward Burne-Jones solemnly buried a tube of Mummy Brown after learning its composition. The episode reveals a troubling aspect of the industrial artistic market, where color becomes a globalized material, detached from any funerary consideration.

The pigment finally disappears as stocks run out and sensibilities evolve, but its existence recalls how far the transformation of the ancient past into simple aesthetic material could go.