Brown

Brown is the colour of earth, wood and skin, of soil and bark and autumn leaves, and it is not a spectral colour at all but a dark, low-saturation orange, a hue that exists only in relation to brighter surroundings. Its symbolism is grounded, literally, in the earth: it stands for stability, the humble, the natural and the down-to-earth, and by extension for the rustic and the poor.

In the Christian tradition brown is pre-eminently the colour of monastic humility, the undyed or cheaply dyed wool of the Franciscan and Capuchin habit, chosen precisely because it was the colour of the cheapest cloth and thus of poverty embraced. That association gives brown a dignity within religious dress that its everyday plainness might not suggest. Brown carries senses of reliability, warmth and comfort, but also of dullness and the drab. It has little formal liturgical use beyond the penitential and the monastic, and in the modern colour literature it is read as the most earthbound and grounding of hues, tied to the physical and the material.

Brown is an earth colour in the most literal sense, and the standard pigments are named after where the earth came from.

Umber is a clay containing iron and manganese oxides, named for Umbria. Sienna is a similar earth named for the Tuscan city. Both are sold raw and burnt, roasting deepening and warming the colour, and the four together, raw and burnt umber and raw and burnt sienna, formed the backbone of the warm neutral range in European painting for centuries. They are cheap, permanent and reliable, which is a rare combination.

Bistre was made from beech soot and used as a wash for drawing. Van Dyck brown, a peat or lignite earth, is rich and notoriously unstable, and paintings that relied on it have darkened badly.

And then there is mummy brown, which was made from ground Egyptian mummies. This is not a legend. It was manufactured and sold by colourmen in Europe from the sixteenth century into the twentieth, made from bituminous material and human and animal remains taken from Egyptian burials, and painters used it as a transparent brown glaze. Some of them, on learning what they had been working with, buried their remaining tubes. Supply and disquiet ended it in the twentieth century.

The colour's symbolic associations, humility, poverty and the monastic habit, come from undyed and cheaply dyed wool rather than from any of these pigments, and they run alongside the pigment history without touching it.