Johannes Vermeer, in original Dutch Jan Vermeer van Delft, was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. Nonetheless, he produced relatively few paintings and evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

"Almost all his paintings," Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women."

Richard Wettstein was an Austrian botanist. His taxonomic system, the Wettstein system was one of the earliest based on phyletic principles.

Wettstein studied in Vienna, where he was a disciple of Anton Kerner von Marilaun and married his daughter Adele. He was a professor at the University of Prague from 1892, and at the University of Vienna from 1899. He newly laid out the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna.

In 1901 he became president of the Vienna Zoological-Botanical Society, and during the same year took part in a scientific expedition to Brazil. In 1919 he was appointed vice-president of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. During his later years, he traveled with his son, Friedrich, to eastern and southern Africa.

The Capture of Brielle by the Watergeuzen, on 1 April 1572 marked a turning point in the uprising of the Low Countries against Spain in the Eighty Years' War. Militarily the success was minor as the port of Brielle was undefended, but it provided the first foothold on land for the rebels at a time when the rebellion was all but crushed, and it offered the sign for a new revolt throughout the Netherlands which led to the formation of the Dutch Republic.