Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour. A cross between the deep redness of blood and the blasé blandness of mud, umber is a havering hue with a haunting humidity all its own. Umber’s ability to ebb and flow between shades of our interior self and those of the exterior world we inhabit make it the perfect pigment for painters as diverse as Bosch and Modigliani, Titian and Velázquez, to create scenes of enduring urgency – scenes we feel as much as see. Swipe umber from the paintbox of art history and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s canvases and the meditativeness of Rothko’s 1962 work Untitled (Umber, Blue, Umber, Brown) would dissolve into drabness.

More like this:

- The disgusting origins of the colour purple

- The colour that means both life and death

- The murky history of the colour yellow

So complex a mixture is umber’s identity of the inner and outer worlds, its very name (originally in Italian ‘terra d’ombra’, or ‘earth of shadows’) is pulled in two directions. Some maintain the word is merely an echo of an actual location, Umbria, the mountainous region of central Italy where, sometime in the 15th Century, the pigment was first professionally concocted from soil rich in manganese and iron oxide.

Others contend that the colour’s name is less a geographical allusion and more a mystical designation inspired by the spiritual depths that the pigment enables artists to plumb, one that owes its origin instead to the Latin ‘umbra’, meaning ‘shadow’. If we mix the two hypotheses together, we discover perhaps something closer to the truth: a paradoxical shadow-land of a hue, one that binds into a single substance the material grittiness of this world and the immaterial gloom of one that lies just beyond our perception.