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2024 was a chaotic year and 2025 promises even more turmoil. Is that best expressed by “a warming, brown hue imbued with richness”, as Pantone describes it? Brown, as Philip Ball writes in Bright Earth, his history of artists and colour, is like a non-colour: “It sits on the border between a real colour and an achromatic one — a ‘dirty’ colour akin to grey. Brown is, in fact, a kind of grey biased towards yellow or orange.”
Ball notes how, compared to costly materials like lapis-lazuli or gold, brown literally came from dirt. Burnt sienna was mined in Italy, becoming rich red-brown on heating. Earth pigments like ochre and umber were used in ancient cave paintings. Varnishing paintings with protective glazes also tended to darken them, forming the image of brownish ‘Old Master’ paintings. The 19th century Impressionists derided this as ‘brown gravy’ art, which they countered with fresh, bright colours.
But the Industrial Revolution was turning their world brown. Claude Monet loved painting the heavy yellow-brown ‘pea-soup’ fog that enveloped London for days, and which we now see in Indian cities. Dusty cities, desert sands, sewage spills and flooding rivers all come in brown. For those who watch the news with gloom, Pantone’s choice of colour may seem all too apt.
Brown has even darker associations. In the 18th century, a
