In later centuries unmummified corpses were passed off as mummy medicine, and eventually some Europeans no longer cared whether the bodies they were ingesting had been mummified or not. Since the 12th century, Europeans had been eating Egyptian mummies as medicine.
(On discovering the source of the pigment, Burne-Jones is said to have been horrified and felt compelled to bury his reserves of mummy brown.)īut it wasn’t just artists who were using ground-up bodies. Nineteenth-century painters Eugène Delacroix, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Edward Burne-Jones were just a few of the artists who found the pigment useful for shading, shadows, and, ironically, flesh tones.
In 1915 a London pigment dealer commented that one mummy would produce enough pigment to last him and his customers 20 years. From the 16th to the 19th century many painters favored the pigment, and it remained available into the 20th century, even as supplies dwindled. Scholars believe he relied heavily on a popular pigment of his time-mummy brown-a concoction made from ground-up Egyptian mummies. If art historians and conservators are right about Interior of a Kitchen, Martin Drölling’s painting from 1815, the artist had help from a surprising source-the grave.
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