Tadema

When the painter of historical scenes Lawrence Alma Tadema told the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones that he was going to see pieces of mummy before they were turned into pigment, Burne-Jones, according to his wife, Georgina, snorted that the name of the pigment was just a childish fancy.

After Alma Tadema informed his colleague that mummy brown was indeed made from mummies, a horrified Burne Jones retrieved his tube of mummy from his studio and buried it in the yard.

In one unusual anecdote about the pigment, the writer Rudyard Kipling describes a day in the 1860s spent with two pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne Jones, Kipling's uncle, and Lawrence Alma Tadema.

"Alma Tadema was an important customer at Roberson at the time they were grinding up mummies in the mid-nineteenth century," says Sally Woodcock, a painting conservator and researcher at the Roberson Archive of the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum.

Woodcock notes that many of the pre-Raphaelite artists who purchased mummy brown from Roberson, such as Alma Tadema, painted Egyptian scenes.