Body colour: The misuse of mummy

Abstract

Mummy, or Egyptian Brown, was manufactured from the embalmed bodies of ancient Egyptians, and can be seen in the context of a range of resinous, transparent brown pigments popular in British painting in the mid‐eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its use was encouraged by the belief that it contained bitumen, an assumption apparently based on the earlier use of both bitumen and mummy as a drug. In the course of at least three hundred years of trade, an unrecorded number of archaeological objects was destroyed in order to make pigment. Its ethical and technical unsuitability as a raw material for paint was ignored by artists and colourmen alike until its use appears to have died out at the start of the twentieth century.

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