Umber is a natural brown clay pigment that contains iron and manganese oxides. The color becomes more intense when calcined (heated), and the resulting pigment is called burnt umber. Its name derives from the Latin word umbra (shadow) and was originally extracted in Umbria, a mountainous region of central Italy, but it is found in many parts of the world. Some of the finest umber comes from Cyprus. It has been used as a pigment since prehistoric times.
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Famous quotes containing the word umber:
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)