[8][9] The Common Germanic adjectives *brûnoz and *brûnâ meant both dark colors and a glistening or shining quality, whence burnish.

[12] Paintings of brown horses and other animals have been found on the walls of the Lascaux cave dating back about 17,300 years.

Light tan was often used on painted Greek amphorae and vases, either as a background for black figures, or the reverse.

In the Middle Ages brown robes were worn by monks of the Franciscan order, as a sign of their humility and poverty.

Russet was a coarse homespun cloth made of wool and dyed with woad and madder to give it a subdued grey or brown shade.

The medieval poem Piers Plowman describes the virtuous Christian:[14] And is gladde of a goune of a graye russetAs of a tunicle of Tarse or of trye scarlet.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 (1511–1574) described them as being rather new in his time.

[15] 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.

Caravaggio and Rembrandt Van Rijn used browns to create chiaroscuro effects, where the subject appeared out of the darkness.

This was a natural earth color composed of over ninety percent organic matter, such as soil and peat.

In the late 20th century, brown became a common symbol in western culture for simple, inexpensive, natural and healthy.

In terms of the visible spectrum, "brown" refers to long wavelength hues, yellow, orange, or red, in combination with low luminance or saturation.

In Brazil, the Portuguese word pardo, which can mean different shades of brown, is used to refer to multiracial people.

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) asks people to identify themselves as branco (white), pardo (brown), negro (black), or amarelo (yellow).

The thin top layer of the Earth's crust on land is largely made up of soil colored different shades of brown.

[35] Brown has been a popular color for military uniforms since the late 18th century, largely because of its wide availability and low visibility.

The color made an excellent natural camouflage, and was adopted by the British Army for their Abyssian Campaign in 1867–1868, and later in the Boer War.

[37] At Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg home, the Berghof, he slept in a "bed which was usually covered by a brown quilt embroidered with a huge swastika.

The swastika also appeared on Hitler's brown satin pajamas, embroidered in black against a red background on the pocket.

From the 1930s onwards, the Party's brown uniforms were mass-produced by German clothing firms such as Hugo Boss.

Labrecque, et al. (2012) have hypothesized that brown would be related to competence when used in advertising, as the color is typically associated with reliability and support.