Brown

• 1. Introduction

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  Brown is everywhere, and almost nobody chooses it. In public opinion surveys across Europe and the United States, brown ranked as the least popular color. Only one percent of respondents named it their favorite, while twenty percent called it their least favorite. Yet this quiet, overlooked shade has been painting the world since before recorded history, shaped the rise and fall of empires, and colored the clothes of popes, peasants, soldiers, and the most feared political movement of the twentieth century. Why does a color so common earn so little love? And how did something found in the soil under our feet become a trademark, a uniform, and a symbol of both poverty and power? The answer stretches from a cave in France painted seventeen thousand years ago to a parcel delivery truck rolling down a street today.

• 2. What Brown Actually Is

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  In the RGB color model that governs every television screen and computer monitor, brown is made by mixing red light at low intensity with green light at an even lower intensity, with blue light also present in most shades. That combination produces something the eye registers as brown, even though brown has no single wavelength of its own. It exists, technically, only as a perception.

  In terms of the visible spectrum, brown refers to long-wavelength hues, yellow, orange, or red, paired with low luminance or saturation. Brown exists as a color perception only in the presence of a brighter contrasting color. Take away that contrast and what looks brown in daylight would simply look like a dim orange or red. The color, in a sense, is always relative.

  Printers and painters work differently. In the CMYK model used in printing, brown is usually made by combining yellow ink with smaller amounts of magenta and black inks. In the older RYB model taught in art classrooms, brown comes from mixing the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. The language around the color has always been similarly indirect. The Old English root, brún, simply meant any dusky or dark shade. The first recorded use of brown as a color name in English dates to the year 1000. The current meaning solidified in Middle English from the fourteenth century onward.

  Languages around the world reach for food and drink to name this color. Turkish speakers call it kahverengi, the color of coffee. In Greek, the word is kafé. Portuguese, Spanish, and French all derive their word for brown from castanea, the Latin word for chestnut. In Malay and Filipino, the color name comes from the word for chocolate. In Japanese, chairo means the color of tea. The color is so tied to the natural world that humans instinctively root it in what they eat and drink.

• 3. Pigments and Dyes

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  Umber is among the oldest pigments known. It is a brown clay composed of iron oxide and between five and twenty percent manganese oxide, and it takes its name from Umbria, the Italian region where it was formerly mined. The principal source today is the island of Cyprus. Paintings made with umber have been dated to 40,000 BC, making it one of the most ancient materials humans ever used to make art.

  Sienna, another clay pigment rich in iron oxide, was mined during the Renaissance around the city of Siena in Tuscany. Sienna contains less than five percent manganese. In its natural form it is a dark yellow ochre; when roasted it becomes a rich reddish brown called burnt sienna. Raw sienna and burnt sienna, along with raw umber and burnt umber, formed the four primary browns Renaissance artists kept on hand.

  Mummy brown was a pigment made from ground Egyptian mummies and used in oil paints. Van Dyck brown, known in Europe as Cologne earth or Cassel earth, was a natural earth pigment made up largely of decayed vegetable matter. It was used by many artists before the painter Anthony van Dyck gave it his name. It was highly unstable and unreliable, and its use was abandoned by the twentieth century, though the name persists for modern synthetic versions.

  Walnuts have served as a dye source since antiquity. The Roman writer Ovid, writing in the first century BC, described how the Gauls used the juice of the hull inside the walnut shell to make a brown dye for wool, or a reddish dye for their hair. The chestnut tree was also pressed into service; its bark, leaves, and nut husks all yield dye. In the Ottoman Empire, the yellow-brown from chestnut leaves was combined with indigo blue to produce shades of green.

  Today almost no modern pigment named after an earth color actually contains natural earth. Mars brown, made with synthetic iron oxide pigments, is typical of this shift. The synthetic versions carry superior coloring power and opacity, but they lack the delicate hue of the originals they replaced.

• 4. Art and the Long Arc

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  Paintings of brown horses and other animals appear on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, dated to roughly 17,300 years ago. The female figures in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings have brown skin, rendered in umber. Ancient Greek painters used light tan either as a background for black figures or in the reverse arrangement on amphorae and vases.

  The Ancient Greeks and Romans developed a reddish-brown ink from the ink of a variety of cuttlefish, a color called sepia. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael both used this ink, and artists have continued using it into modern times.

  In the Middle Ages, painters and book illuminators rarely reached for dark browns. They preferred bright, distinct colors: red, blue, and green. The Renaissance painter and writer Giorgio Vasari, who lived from 1511 to 1574, described the umber pigments as being rather new in his time. They became more widely available in Europe only toward the end of the fifteenth century, when oil painting arrived and changed everything.

  Oil paint unlocked brown in ways tempera and fresco had not. Jan van Eyck in Northern Europe featured rich earth browns in his portraits to set off brighter colors. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Caravaggio and Rembrandt Van Rijn used browns to pull figures out of darkness in a technique called chiaroscuro. Rembrandt also added umber to the ground layers of his paintings because it promoted faster drying. He later adopted Cassel earth, the pigment that became Van Dyck brown, which Rubens also used.

  Brown fell sharply out of fashion among the French impressionists, who rejected it in favor of bright, pure hues. The notable exception was Paul Gauguin, who created luminous brown portraits of the people and landscapes of French Polynesia. By the late twentieth century, brown had migrated out of fine art and into everyday life, becoming a common symbol in western culture for simplicity, natural origins, and affordable wholesomeness.

• 5. Class, Poverty, and Power

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  In Ancient Rome, brown clothing was associated with the lower classes and with barbarians. The urban poor were called "pullati," literally "those dressed in brown." The stigma persisted for centuries. In the Middle Ages, each social class was expected to wear a color suited to their station, and grey and brown were the colors of the poor.

  Russet, a coarse homespun cloth made of wool and dyed with woad and madder to produce a subdued grey or brown shade, was the material of the poor. The statute of 1363 required poor English people to wear russet. The medieval poem Piers Plowman celebrated the virtuous Christian as someone equally glad in a gown of grey russet as in fine Tarsian silk or scarlet.

  Franciscan monks adopted brown robes in the Middle Ages as a deliberate sign of humility and poverty, turning the color's low-class associations into a spiritual statement.

  Centuries later, brown took a darker turn. In the 1920s, the Nazi Party in Germany chose brown as its color largely for a practical reason: large quantities of war-surplus brown uniforms from Germany's former colonial forces in Africa were cheaply available. The Nazi paramilitary organization called the Sturmabteilung wore these uniforms and became known as the brownshirts. The color spread through the party's identity. Their national headquarters in Munich was called the Brown House. Their seizure of power in 1933 was called the Brown Revolution. Adolf Hitler slept under a brown quilt embroidered with a swastika at his Obersalzberg home, the Berghof, and wore brown satin pajamas with a matching brown silk robe. From the 1930s onward, the party's brown uniforms were mass-produced by German clothing firms including Hugo Boss.

  The color had also been chosen because it suited the working-class and military image the party wished to project. Brown had always carried associations with labor and the land. The Nazis turned that symbolic weight into a uniform.

• 6. Soldiers and Camouflage

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  Brown became a standard military color in the late eighteenth century, chosen mainly because it was widely available and hard to spot at a distance. When the Continental Army was established in 1775 at the start of the American Revolution, the first Continental Congress declared that official uniforms would be brown. The choice was unpopular. Many militia officers were already wearing blue, and in 1778 the Congress asked George Washington to settle the matter. In 1779 Washington made blue and buff the official colors.

  In 1846, Indian soldiers of the Corps of Guides in British India began wearing a yellowish shade of tan that came to be called khaki, from the Urdu word for dust-colored, itself drawn from an earlier Persian word for soil. The color blended naturally into the landscape and proved so effective that the British Army adopted it for their Abyssinian Campaign in 1867-1868 and again in the Boer War. The United States Army adopted khaki during the Spanish-American War in 1896, and the United States Navy and Marine Corps followed.

• 7. Brown in Business and Culture

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  United Parcel Service made brown its signature corporate color, adopting it from the Pullman Company, whose rail cars had used the same shade. UPS chose brown partly because it is easy to keep clean, and partly because of the associations of luxury that Pullman brown evoked. The company has filed two trademarks on the color to prevent other shipping companies from using it in ways that create market confusion. In advertising, UPS refers to itself simply as "Brown," using the line "What can Brown do for you?"

  In Brazil, the Portuguese word pardo, meaning various shades of brown, is used to refer to multiracial people. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics asks residents to classify themselves as branco, pardo, negro, or amarelo. In 2008-43.8 percent of the population identified as pardo.

  In Wicca, brown represents endurance, solidity, grounding, and strength, and is associated with the element of earth. In sports, the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League take their name from founder and long-time coach Paul Brown. The San Diego Padres of Major League Baseball use brown as their primary color. FC St. Pauli, the German football club, wears brown shirts as its primary kit.

  The English language has absorbed brown into a set of idioms that carry their own small histories. To be brown as a berry means to be deeply suntanned. A brownout is a partial loss of electricity. Brownfields are abandoned industrial sites complicated by environmental contamination. To brown-nose means to flatter a superior obsequiously. And to be in a brown study, an older expression, means to be lost in melancholy thought. That last phrase sits quietly at the edge of the language, a reminder that brown has always carried a shadow.