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The Mortuary Palette: When Human Remains Became Paint
- Anushrita
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
What if one of the most unusual colours on a 19th-century artist’s palette came from the remains of the dead?
For generations, European artists had access to a pigment known as Mummy Brown—a warm, translucent brown associated with the ground remains of Egyptian mummies. Its story sits at an unsettling intersection of art, commerce, colonialism, medicine, and the history of art materials.
Today, the idea of turning a human body into paint sounds unthinkable. Yet for centuries, Egyptian mummies were removed from their original cultural context and treated in Europe as commodities, curiosities, medicines, and raw materials. Eventually, some found their way into artists’ studios.
The history of Mummy Brown is therefore more than an eccentric footnote in art history. It raises a difficult question about what happens when cultural heritage—and even human remains—becomes a material for someone else's creative world.
From Egyptian Tombs to European Markets
The story of Mummy Brown began long before artists started putting the pigment on their canvases.
In medieval and early modern Europe, Egyptian mummies were associated with mumia, a substance believed to have medicinal properties. Ground mummy material was sold and consumed as a remedy for various ailments. The European fascination with Egyptian remains eventually expanded beyond medicine.
Mummies became objects of curiosity and commercial value, feeding a broader European appetite for Egyptian antiquities.
By at least the 16th century, mummified remains were also being incorporated into pigments. Historical sources describe a brown material made by grinding mummy remains and combining them with substances associated with the embalming process, including bituminous material, pitch, and myrrh. The resulting pigment became known as Mummy Brown, Egyptian Brown, or momie.
The exact recipe was not necessarily identical from one manufacturer or period to another. That variability is important. Mummy Brown was not simply a standardized powder made from one ingredient. Its composition could depend on the mummy itself, the substances used during embalming, and the materials added by the color-maker.
What Made Mummy Brown Useful?
Despite its disturbing origins, Mummy Brown had qualities that made it attractive to painters.
It was generally a rich, transparent brown, positioned tonally somewhere around the family of umbers. Its transparency made it useful for glazing, shading, and building up darker passages without completely obscuring the colors underneath. Historical sources also associate it with flesh tones, hair, shadows, and chiaroscuro.
In other words, artists were not necessarily choosing Mummy Brown because of its unusual origin. They were choosing it because it worked as a color.
That distinction matters. Looking back at historical art materials can make modern artists assume that unusual ingredients must have been valued because of their novelty. In reality, pigments were selected primarily for their visual and technical properties: transparency, texture, drying behaviour, color, and compatibility with other materials.
Mummy Brown, however, had an additional problem. Its composition could make its behaviour unpredictable. Historical accounts describe it as a relatively fugitive pigment, meaning it was not especially reliable in terms of permanence. It could also have drying and cracking problems. Conservation records note that 19th-century Mummy Brown was used particularly as a transparent brown for oil painting and glazes.
So even before the ethical questions became impossible to ignore, Mummy Brown was not necessarily the perfect pigment.
Who Actually Used It?
Mummy Brown became particularly associated with 18th- and 19th-century European painting, including the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
Artists associated with its use include Eugène Delacroix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Art UK notes that Mummy Brown was especially popular among Pre-Raphaelite artists, while National Geographic identifies Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema among artists who kept the pigment in their palettes.
But there is an important caveat: it is difficult to confidently identify Mummy Brown in individual surviving paintings.
Pigment identification often requires technical examination, and testing historic artworks can be complicated or destructive. As a result, claims that a particular famous painting definitely contains Mummy Brown should be treated cautiously. National Geographic, for example, notes that works by artists such as Delacroix have been considered possible candidates, but establishing the pigment's presence is difficult.
This uncertainty makes the story even more interesting. We can identify artists who purchased or used the material, but we cannot simply look at every warm brown passage in a Victorian painting and declare it “mummy paint.”
The Artist Who Buried His Paint
Perhaps the most famous story associated with Mummy Brown involves Edward Burne-Jones.
According to accounts preserved by his family, Burne-Jones initially did not believe that the pigment's name was literal. He apparently assumed “Mummy Brown” referred simply to a particular color.
Then his friend and fellow artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema reportedly told him that the pigment really was made from mummy material. Alma-Tadema had apparently encountered a mummy at a color-maker's establishment before it was processed into pigment.
Burne-Jones was horrified.
He retrieved the tube of Mummy Brown he owned and gave it what was described as a “decent burial” in the garden. The story became one of the most memorable anecdotes in the history of artists' materials—and an unusually literal ending for a tube of paint.
Whether every detail of the story has been embellished over time, the anecdote captures a major shift in perception. Once the material's origin was understood, the pigment could no longer be viewed simply as another brown.
When Supply Became a Problem
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, obtaining genuine mummy material was becoming increasingly difficult.
The demand for Egyptian antiquities had created an extensive market for mummies, while changing attitudes toward archaeology and the treatment of ancient remains gradually challenged their use as commercial commodities. By the early 20th century, suppliers were reportedly struggling to obtain enough material for pigment production. In 1904, one paint-making firm even publicly sought an Egyptian mummy for the purpose of making color.
The scarcity of genuine material also contributed to Mummy Brown's decline.
At the same time, artists had access to an expanding range of synthetic and mineral pigments. There was less practical reason to rely on an inconsistent and ethically troubling material when other browns could achieve similar effects.
Mummy Brown's disappearance was therefore not caused by a single event. Changing artistic preferences, pigment technology, questions of permanence, declining supplies, and growing awareness of the nature of the material all played a role.
The Last Mummies in the Paint Shop
The strangest part of the story may be how recently the practice appears to have continued.
London color-maker C. Roberson & Co. continued to list Mummy Brown in its catalogue into the 20th century. According to a 1964 TIME report, the company's managing director said that the firm had run out of mummies and could no longer make the paint. He recalled that the company had sold its last complete mummy years earlier.
Art UK similarly reports that the company's last tube was made in 1964, although the pigment had already been declining in popularity for decades.
That date is startling.
The idea of mummy-derived paint belongs in the distant world of Renaissance curiosity cabinets or Victorian eccentricity. Yet according to these historical accounts, its commercial production extended into the 20th century.
Modern products sold under names such as “Mummy Brown” are not made from human remains. Contemporary substitutes use mineral and earth-based materials instead.
More Than a Strange Pigment
It is tempting to tell the story of Mummy Brown as an amusing art-history curiosity: artists painted with mummies, one painter buried his tube, and eventually the color disappeared.
But that version leaves out the most important part.
The history of Mummy Brown is also a history of how European markets treated Egyptian bodies as commodities. The movement of an Egyptian mummy from a tomb to a European marketplace—and eventually into a tube of artists' paint—reflects a much larger history of collecting, colonial extraction, and the commercialization of cultural heritage.
A mummy was not originally created to become an art material. It was the preserved body of a person, prepared within a specific religious and cultural tradition. Turning that body into a commodity stripped away much of the meaning attached to it.
That is what makes Mummy Brown particularly revealing when viewed through the history of art.
Artists' palettes are often presented as collections of colors, techniques, and creative possibilities. But pigments also have histories. Some come from minerals mined from the earth. Others came from plants, insects, shells, toxic compounds, industrial processes—or, in this extraordinary case, human remains.
Every color has a story.
Sometimes, that story is beautiful.
Sometimes, it is uncomfortable.
And sometimes, the darkest history in a painting is hiding in the color itself.
Mummy Brown may have disappeared from the modern palette, but its story remains as a reminder that art materials are never just materials. They can carry histories of science, trade, power, culture—and the people whose lives were transformed into something as deceptively simple as paint.
