story 001 · art · a pigment
this paint was made from dead people.
the short, written out
this brown… was made from dead people.
it’s called mummy brown. for two hundred years, colour makers ground up egyptian mummies… people, and their cats… and mixed the powder into paint.
painters loved it. warm, see-through, perfect for shadows.
edward burne-jones thought the name was just a name. then a friend told him he’d seen a mummy at the paint maker’s… waiting to be ground.
so burne-jones gave his only tube a funeral, in the garden. his nephew, rudyard kipling, wrote that he could still find the spot.
in 1964, the last company still selling it admitted they’d run out of mummies. its director told time magazine: “we might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere… but not enough to make any more paint.”
mummy brown is still sold today, only now it’s clay and rust.
the print that goes with it
sleeping animals
curled fox and cats, expressionist animal pile, warm dark oil
no. 360 · 8″×10″ or 16″×20″ · from $20.00 · see the print
sources
- georgiana burne-jones, memorials of edward burne-jones (1904)
- rudyard kipling, something of myself (1937)
- time magazine, “the passing of mummy brown”, 2 october 1964
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
