This dress was worn about 1860-1865 by her grandmother, lady Cecelia Maria van Pallandt-Steengracht (1813-1899). Lady Pallandt-Steengracht inherited Kasteel Keukenhof from her father, Lord Johan Steengracht van Oostcapelle, the first director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in 1846. This dress, in highly fashionable cornflower blue, reflects the status of this distinguished family. Synthetic colours such as this were developed in secret by the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Guimet in 1826 and were commercially produced later in the nineteenth century. The increasingly wide range of colours that dictated the fashion image in the 1860's were not completely without risk, the chemical composition of some dyes made them very bad for the health.