Mummy Brown and Egyptian Blue: John Donovan ’20 Paints With the Past

All paints are made of something. Mummy brown was made of someone. For his exhibition Mummy Brown and Egyptian Blue, John Donovan ’20, a Yale graduate and a teaching artist, recreated a pigment that European painters once made from human remains.

The history of this pigment dates back to the 1800s. Two centuries ago, mummies were robbed from their tombs, imported to European factories, and ground up to create a pigment known as “mummy brown.” Artists considered the paint unmatched at capturing skin tones. Its popularity peaked when Orientalist painting flourished and the Western world became obsessed with the mystery of ancient Egypt. Demand grew so high that it became a trade exploited by various paint firms. When real mummies ran out, some dealers even resorted to executing enslaved people and criminals .

For his senior thesis at Yale, Donovan wanted to test whether this paint was really the best for painting human skin. He mummified a duck acquired from a local farm, following the exact historical embalming and wrapping procedures the Egyptians did. Then he ground up the duck’s legs and mixed it into paint.

The result of his creation was an exhibition of portraits, each depicting a person of a different skin color. Donovan wanted to give each of these subjects lots of freedom to plan their own portrait, hosting “sessions for each of them where they decided poses and lighting” so the subjects would “have a lot of say in their own representation.” Such “say” is a disruption of the paint’s imperialistic history: a pigment once made by exploiting people gives people of every skin tone a place in the spotlight.

“Because a lot of times in European art,” said Donovan, “people of marginalized identities didn’t have a lot of say in how they were depicted in art.”

Entering the Christopher Brodigan Gallery, visitors first notice an intricately adorned Egyptian-style coffin placed in a glass case at the center of the space. Inside lies a mummified duck, only its head peeking out of the linen bandage. This detail takes on more significance after one spots a stretched sheepskin painting hanging on the left wall. Deliberately grotesque, it depicts a naked human figure, with a duck’s head and cathedral-like patterns in its innards, devouring a man, who turns out to be Donovan himself.

On the opposite wall rests a painting on goat leather, displaying a figure with a mummified head. It balances a different face in each hand: one rendered in the style of ancient Egyptian art, and the other belonging to the artist himself. This idea of the face drawn in ancient Egyptian style originated in a dream, the artist explains: “I had been reading about the Dan people who, in order for boys to become men, have to carve masks from a figure they saw in a dream.” A woman from Ancient Egypt had appeared in Donovan’s own dreams, leaving such a lasting impression that he chose to incorporate her into his work.

Regarding the bizarre “mummy brown” paint he recreated for his portraits, Donovan is outspoken about its shortcomings.

“It was actually really, really bad to paint with,” he said. “It didn’t have the right qualities to make a good paint.”

Donovan describes in an interview with Groton, “So my conclusion at the end of the project was that these artists in the 1800s painted with this pigment purely for the mystical quality of it.”

Ultimately, what makes the exhibition intriguing is that it is less about perfecting paintings than about making a point about ethics and historical injustice. Donovan takes a stance few other artists do: he treats his art as a process that leads to an intellectual revelation rather than a perfected final product.

When asked about this artistic philosophy, Donovan cited a quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”

“Good art is something that can’t be put into words,” said Donovan, “but it should say something about the artist’s experience, the viewer’s experience, and the material.”

On display in the Christopher Brodigan Gallery until November 14, Mummy Brown and Egyptian Blue provides an almost spiritual illusion of slipping through the ordinary into a space where ritual meets science, history meets the present, and grievance meets its verdict.