Brown
Brown is a color. It can be thought as a darker, typically desaturated shade of orange, and can often be produced by combining red and yellow with another color, namely blue.
In the RYB color model, brown is made by mixing the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. In the CMYK color model used in printing and painting, brown is usually made by combining yellow ink with smaller amounts of magenta and black inks. In the RGB color model used to project colors onto television screens and computer monitors, brown is the result of combining red light at low intensity, and green light at an even lower intensity, with blue light also being present in most shades of the color.
The color brown is strongly associated with, and seen widely within, the natural world. Elements of the environment such as minerals, soil and wood are frequently brown in color; consequently, many animals have brown pelts, scales or feathers in order to better camouflage themselves within their habitats. Likewise, brown is often seen in the biology of humans; brown hair, eye color and skin pigmentation are commonplace among humankind. The color is also frequently seen in plant-derived materials such as plant fibers, bark, fruits, nuts, and seeds.
Etymology
The term is from Old English brún, in origin for any dusky or dark shade of color. The first recorded use of brown as a color name in English was in 1000.The Common Germanic adjectives *brûnoz and *brûnâ meant both dark colors and a glistening or shining quality, whence burnish. The current meaning developed in Middle English from the 14th century.
Words for the color brown around the world often come from foods or beverages; in the eastern Mediterranean, the word for brown often comes from the color of coffee: in Turkish, the word for brown is kahverengi; in Greek, kafé.
In Portuguese, Spanish and French, the word for brown or for a specific shade of brown is derived from the word for chestnut. In Southeast Asia, the color name for brown often comes from the word for chocolate: coklat in Malay and tsokolate in Filipino. In Japan, the word chairo means the color of tea.
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: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 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 earth. This was a natural earth color composed of over ninety percent organic matter, such as soil and peat. It was used by Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, and later became commonly known as Van Dyck brown.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.
Brown in science and nature
Optics
Brown is a dark orange color. It can be thought of as dark orange, but it can also be made in other ways. In the RGB color model, which uses red, green and blue light in various combinations to make all the colors on computer and television screens, it is made by mixing red and green light.In terms of the visible spectrum, "brown" refers to long wavelength hues, yellow, orange, or red, in combination with low luminance or saturation.
Since brown may cover a wide range of the visible spectrum, composite adjectives are used such as red brown, yellowish brown, dark brown or light brown.
As a color of low intensity, brown is a tertiary color: a mix of the three subtractive primary colors is brown if the cyan content is low. Brown exists as a color perception only in the presence of a brighter color contrast. Yellow, orange, red, or rose objects are still perceived as such if the general illumination level is low, despite reflecting the same amount of red or orange light as a brown object would in normal lighting conditions.
Brown pigments, dyes and inks
- Raw umber and burnt umber are two of the oldest pigments used by humans. Umber is a brown clay, containing a large amount of iron oxide and between five and twenty percent manganese oxide, which give the color. Its shade varies from a greenish brown to a dark brown. It takes its name from the Italian region of Umbria, where it was formerly mined. The principal source today is the island of Cyprus. Burnt umber is the same pigment which has been roasted, which turns the pigment darker and more reddish.
- Raw sienna and burnt sienna are also clay pigments rich in iron oxide, which were mined during the Renaissance around the city of Siena in Tuscany. Sienna contains less than five percent manganese. The natural sienna earth is a dark yellow ochre color; when roasted it becomes a rich reddish brown called burnt sienna.
- Mummy brown was a pigment used in oil paints made from ground Egyptian mummies.
- Caput mortuum is a haematite iron oxide pigment, used in painting. The name is also used in reference to mummy brown.
- Van Dyck brown, known in Europe as Cologne earth or Cassel earth, is another natural earth pigment, that was made up largely of decayed vegetal matter. It made a rich dark brown, and was widely used during the Renaissance to the 19th century It takes its name from the painter Anthony van Dyck, but it was used by many other artists before him. It was highly unstable and unreliable, so its use was abandoned by the 20th century, though the name continues to be used for modern synthetic pigments. The color of Van Dyck brown can be recreated by mixing ivory black with mauve or with Venetian red, or mixing cadmium red with cobalt blue.
- Mars brown. The names of the earth colors are still used, but very few modern pigments with these names actually contain natural earths; most of their ingredients today are synthetic. Mars brown is typical of these new colors, made with synthetic iron oxide pigments. The new colors have a superior coloring power and opacity, but not the delicate hue as their namesakes.
- Walnuts have been used to make a brown dye since antiquity. The Roman writer Ovid, in the first century BC described how the Gauls used the juice of the hull or husk inside the shell of the walnut to make a brown dye for wool, or a reddish dye for their hair.
- The chestnut tree has also been used since ancient times as a source brown dye. The bark of the tree, the leaves and the husk of the nuts have all been used to make dye. The leaves were used to make a beige or yellowish-brown dye, and in the Ottoman Empire the yellow-brown from chestnut leaves was combined with indigo blue to make shades of green.
Brown eyes