Bodice

This green bodice belonged to Anna Bishop (1826-1894, née Fyfe), and is one of two green silk bodices gifted to the museum in 1958. The second bodice has had its sleeves and two outer panels of fabric removed.

Anna Bishop's daughter, Mrs Maude Nicholls noted in a letter to the museum, that her mother wore one of the green bodices on the occasion of her marriage to William Bishop in Nelson on 5 September 1844, and that she could be seen wearing it in a wedding portrait by Charles Heaphy. The portrait has subsequently been gifted to the Alexander Turnbull Library. In the portrait Anna wears a bodice with full length sleeves, so it could be the second bodice, or this bodice has had its sleeves shortened. Maude noted that the matching skirt ‘was dyed later on, & used as part of a rich red dress’, a fate similar to that of many a nineteenth-century skirt in the hands of an economising woman.

The green bodice, decades later continues to hold tangible traces of her body, in its creases where it cupped her breasts as seen in Heaphy's portrait, and, more intimately, on the inside where it is stained with breast milk. Anna gave birth to her first child, William, in 1845. He was followed by nine more children, the youngest of whom was Maude who was born in 1870.

Anna and William Bishop lived in the Matai Valley until 1847 when they moved to Wellington.