Dress

A voluminous skirt billows out from the fitted bodice of this outfit, creating an expanse of intense blue punctuated by woven stripes. Both natural and synthetic dyes were used to generate the dazzling hues that became particularly fashionable in Britain during the 1850s and 1860s. The streets and drawing rooms must have been awash with colour. Bright blue was a popular colour, and silk a stylish choice for dress fabric as it took the dye very well, producing an intense glossy sheen.

Not everyone approved of these striking shades and the French historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) found women's dress 'loud and overcharged with ornament' when he visited England in the 1860s. He thought that the colours were 'outrageously crude...each swearing at the others' and cited 'violate dresses, of a really ferocious violet;' 'purple or poppy red silks, grass green dresses' and 'azure blue scarves' as particularly offensive to the eye.

Isobella Bowhill (1840-1920), the donor's grandmother, is said to have worn this dress to the International Exhibition of 1862 in London.