You likely take the various colors around you for granted, assuming there’s nothing special about the blue of your jeans or anyhing potentially disgusting about the browns of that painting you bought at an antique store. But many colors are derived from odd sources.
For instance, rulers of France and much of Europe had to be wary, for not knowing about certain colors was potentially deadly. Green wallpaper can be much more dangerous than you thought.
Much of the research behind these eight bizarre facts is extensively based on journalist Victoria Finlay’s amazing 2014 book The Brilliant History of Color in Art.
1. Until 1925, a common shade of brown was made from the flesh of Egyptian mummies.
Smithsonian dates the end of “mummy brown” as late as 1964, when the “manufacturer” ran out of mummies to grind into paint. Painters had been using mummy brown for centuries, collecting the bizarre substance, likely at first from an apothecary, that would sell for medicinal purposes.
Victoria Finlay explains in The Brilliant History of Color in Art how this came about:
Actually, mummy was first used as a medicinal substance as early as 1300, which is even more bizarre. Virtually all the pigments that were known to painters from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance were also medicines, including lead white, minium, vermilion, chalk, orpiment, sepia, ultramarine … and mummy. These medicines were supplied by apothecaries, who were the main sources of supplies for painters. No doubt an artist somewhere saw mummy in his local apothecary shop and thought, “I wonder if this would make a good bit of paint?”
Eventually in 1712, an artist supply shop was opened in Paris called À la Momie or “To the Mummy.” The color really took off and later in the century and according to Finlay it was said that the finest brown used by the current president of the Royal Academy of Arts was “the flesh of mummy, the most fleshy are the best parts.”
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Chenciner continues on to explain that ox blood was seen to have magical powers by the superstitious “Oriental dyers.” In the book it’s also pointed out that Nathaniel Hawthorne alluded to this process in The Scarlet Letter, writing that the letter on Hester Prynne’s chest had the smell of blood.
Finlay explains in The Brilliant History of Color in Art that the process started as a Turkish recipe for turning the color into dye and eventually in Europe the Dutch figured out a process in 1730.
The Royal Tapestry Manufactory of Les Gobelins in Paris particularly used the color in the 17th century for the wall coverings of King Louis XIV. Ox blood and cow or sheep dung steeped in rancid castor oil hung from royal walls.
BONUS: The white design of Washington, D.C., was modeled after a complete misconception of how Rome used to look.
Pierre Charles L’Enfant was appointed by George Washington in 1791 to plan what would become Washington, D.C. As Finlay explains, the early Americans wanted something based on what they believed ancient Rome and Greece looked like since many aspects of their new government were influenced by these cultures. Unfortunately they had the look all wrong:
Most of the important buildings and sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome were not white. We now know that just about all of them were once covered in bright designs; some were even decorated in pure gold leaf. But that didn’t fit with what people in later centuries wanted to see. They thought colors were frivolous and showy, and they preferred to imagine an idealized, pristine white classical world.
All images Getty unless otherwise noted.
