The Most Disturbing Paint Colour in History

One afternoon in a London garden, the painter Edward Burne-Jones learned what was in one of his tubes of paint. He carried it outside and buried it in the grass, and a child planted a daisy on the spot. The colour was called mummy brown, and it was made from the Egyptian dead. For centuries, bodies taken from the burial grounds of Egypt were ground into medicine, and then into paint. This film follows that brown from the mummy pits of Saqqara, through the apothecary's jar and the colourman's shop, to canvases that still hang in galleries. It is told through the people who were there: an English merchant who walked on the dead by candlelight in 1586, a royal druggist's account of a mummy dealer in Alexandria, Georgiana Burne-Jones's memory of the tube's funeral, and the London firm that ran out of mummies in 1964. PRIMARY SOURCES • Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904): https://archive.org/details/memorials... • John Sanderson, account of the Saqqara mummy pits, 1586, in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), excerpt: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/node... • Pierre Pomet, A Compleat History of Druggs (1712), as quoted in Household Words, vol. XV (1857): https://djo.org.uk/household-words/vo... • Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall (1658), quoted in Chris Elliott, "Bandages, Bitumen, Bodies and Business", Aegyptiaca: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de... • William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3 Scene 4: https://folger.edu/explore/shakespear... • George Field, Chromatography (1835); later edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20915 • Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (1937): https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale... • Time (1964) on C. Roberson & Co., as quoted in Cabinet: https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47... FURTHER READING • Lauren R. Bruce, "The corpse on the canvas: the story of 'mummy brown' paint", Art UK: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/th... • Fitzwilliam Museum, "The soul in ancient Egypt": https://book-of-the-dead.fitzmuseum.c... • "Saqqara's Working Stiffs", Archaeology (2019): https://archaeology.org/issues/septem... • Study of bitumen in Egyptian mummy balms (open access): https://core.ac.uk/download/73983378.pdf • The royal hearts and Martin Drolling, Un jour de plus à Paris: https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en... • Frederick Hollyer, The Burne-Jones and Morris families (1874), National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/se... • The site of the Grange, London Gardens Trust: https://londongardenstrust.org/site-r... • The term "mummy" in UK museums, Museums Association (2023): https://www.museumsassociation.org/mu... • "Ground Up Mummies Were Once an Ingredient in Paint", Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-... • Harvard's Forbes Pigment Collection, Boston Globe (2026): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/0... • Mummia, overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia IMAGES Public-domain and open-access works from the National Portrait Gallery, Rijksmuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée Carnavalet, Musée du Louvre, Folger Shakespeare Library, Wellcome Collection, Bibliothèque nationale de France, National Library of Scotland and Wikimedia Commons. [Add the full credit list from the edit.] Noxen Archives explores the darker corners of history, art, literature and human belief. For curious minds drawn to uncomfortable things. #NoxenArchives #ArtHistory #AncientEgypt