History and art
Ancient history
Brown has been used in art since
prehistoric times. Paintings using umber, a natural clay pigment composed of
iron oxide and manganese oxide, have been dated to 40,000 BC. Paintings of
brown horses and other animals have been found on the walls of the Lascaux cave
dating back about 17,300 years. The female figures in ancient Egyptian tomb
paintings have brown skin, painted with umber. Light tan was often used on
painted Greek amphorae and vases, either as a background for black figures, or
the reverse.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans produced a
fine reddish-brown ink, of a color called sepia, made from the ink of a variety
of cuttlefish. This ink was used by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and other
artists during the Renaissance, and by artists up until the present time.
In Ancient Rome, brown clothing was
associated with the lower classes or barbarians. The term for the plebeians, or
urban poor, was "pullati", which meant literally "those dressed
in brown".
Post-classical history
In the Middle Ages brown robes were worn by
monks of the Franciscan order, as a sign of their humility and poverty. Each
social class was expected to wear a color suitable to their station; and grey
and brown were the colors of the poor. Russet was a coarse homespun cloth made of
wool and dyed with woad and madder to give it a subdued grey or brown shade. By
the statute of 1363, poor English people were required to wear russet. The
medieval poem Piers Plowman describes the virtuous Christian:
And is gladde of a goune of a graye russet
As of a tunicle of Tarse or of trye
scarlet.
In the Middle Ages dark brown pigments were
rarely used in art; painters and book illuminators artists of that period
preferred bright, distinct colors such as red, blue and green, rather than dark
colors. The umbers were not widely used in Europe
before the end of the fifteenth century; The Renaissance painter and writer
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) described them as being rather new in his time.
Artists began using far greater use of
browns when oil painting arrived in the late fifteenth century. During the
Renaissance, artists generally used four different browns; raw umber, the dark
brown clay mined from the earth around Umbria, in Italy; raw sienna, a
reddish-brown earth mined near Siena, in Tuscany; burnt umber, the Umbrian clay
heated until it turned a darker shade, and burnt sienna, heated until it turned
a dark reddish brown. In Northern Europe , Jan
van Eyck featured rich earth browns in his portraits to set off the brighter
colors.
Modern history
17th and 18th century
The 17th and 18th century saw the greatest
use of brown. Caravaggio and Rembrandt Van Rijn used browns to create
chiaroscuro effects, where the subject appeared out of the darkness. Rembrandt
also added umber to the ground layers of his paintings because it promoted
faster drying. Rembrandt also began to use new brown pigment, called Cassel
earth or Cologne
19th and 20th century
Brown was generally hated by the French
impressionists, who preferred bright, pure colors. The exception among French
19th-century artists was Paul Gauguin, who created luminous brown portraits of
the people and landscapes of French Polynesia .
In the late 20th century, brown became a
common symbol in western culture for simple, inexpensive, natural and healthy.
Bag lunches were carried in plain brown paper bags; packages were wrapped in
plain brown paper. Brown bread and brown sugar were viewed as more natural and
healthy than white bread and white sugar.
Source From Wikipedia
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