Brown Family Tartan
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern BRBRBKRG.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 8 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=432
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1850 The Scott Adie collection, a book of manufacturers samples, was recently sold at auction. The book is dated 1850 and the samples are thought to represent the tartans available for purchase between 1840-50.
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1850 — Brown Family Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- 01/01/1905 — Brown (register-of-tartans, record)
A Scott-Adie (London) catalogue of the early 1900s showed a tie in this 'Brown' tartan. John Brown, Queen Victoria's Highland servant, usually wore a tweed kilt claiming that although of Highland origin, he had no claim to any specific tartan. This sett has also been seen sold as Grady (see STR #1478). - pre 1905 — Brown (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
A Scott-Adie (London) catalogue of the early 1900's showed a tie in this 'Brown' tartan. John Brown, Queen Victoria's Highland servant usually wore a tweed kilt claiming that although of Highland origin, he had no claim to any specific tartan. This has also been reported as being sold as Grady (see # 5083 and 1141). 7th Aug 2009 - letter from chief of the Brouns/Browns Sir Wayne Hercules Broun 14th Baronet asking that the clan tartan be recorded as using a very light blue rather than the conventional medium blue. However, the changing of what may have been recognised for quite some years as a tartan for Browns, could 'disenfranchise' all those Browns who have purchased the dark blue version and is to be avoided if at all possible. There is a sample of Brown with a grey in place of the dark blue under the double set of tramlines which may be a weathered or faded version of this # 432. Letter in archives.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1850 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 391
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 432
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 432
Thread count
DB/24 R4 DB8 R4 DB8 K72 R32 G/8
One full sett is 288 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s8/db6r1db2r1db2k18r8g2~x4/