The Strange History Behind Mummy Brown

One of the most unsettling details in Mummy Brown is not fiction at all.

For several centuries, artists in Europe used a pigment known as “Mummy Brown.” The name was not poetic exaggeration—it was literal. The pigment was originally made from ground-up Egyptian mummies, mixed with oils or resins to create a rich, translucent brown paint.

The practice began as early as the 16th century. At the time, powdered mummy was already traded in Europe as a supposed medicinal substance called mumia. Apothecaries sold it as a cure for everything from headaches to internal bleeding. Eventually, artists discovered that the same material could produce a distinctive paint colour—deep, warm, and slightly transparent, ideal for glazing and shadow tones.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the pigment became commercially available from artists’ suppliers. Tubes of “Mummy Brown” were sold alongside more familiar colours like ochre and umber. Few painters stopped to consider what the name really meant.

Some did.

A famous story from the Victorian period tells of an artist who, upon learning that his paint was literally made from human remains, held a small burial ceremony for the tube in his garden.

By the early 20th century the supply of usable mummies had effectively run out. Manufacturers quietly replaced the formula with mixtures of asphalt, iron oxides, and other pigments. The name survived, but the disturbing original ingredient disappeared.

Today, Mummy Brown exists mostly as a historical curiosity—a reminder that art history sometimes contains details stranger than fiction.

Which is precisely why it makes such fertile ground for a Victorian horror.