Netherlands

Famous Dutch People: Dutch Artists, Scientists, Leaders, Musicians, Politicians and Athletes

Netherlands has its share of famous people, world-renowned painters, artists and sculptors, architects, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, composers and explorers that have contributed to the country’s national identity, lifestyle and culture. These famous Dutch gives the reader a cross section of famous people from different fields, past and present.

:: List of Famous People from Netherlands ::

Jan de Bont
Jan de Bont was born in Eindhoven on October 22, 1943. He is one of the famous people involved in the movie industry that hails from the Netherlands. Jan de Bont is a producer, film director and cinematographer who worked mainly in Hollywood. He was born into a very large family, being one of 17 children. His initially worked as a cameraman and cinematographer for Adrian Ditvoorst, a Dutch avant garde director, one of which was entitled “I’ll be in Madras Somewhere Later” or “Ik Kom Wat Later Naar Madras” in Dutch. Jan de Bont got noticed for the movie “Turkish Delight” which was shot in 1973. In this film he worked as a cinematographer. The film director was Paul Verhoeven and the movie starred Dutch actors Monique van de Ven, whom he later married and Rutger Hauer. While most of his body of work was as a cinematographer, Jan de Bont also ventured into producing “Speed 2: Cruise Control” (also as director), “Equilibrium” and “Minority Report.” As a director, he helmed the films “Twister,” “Speed,” “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” and “The Haunting,”

Rutger Hauer
Dutch TV and film actor Rutger Oelsen Hauer was born to actor parents on January 23, 1944 in Breukelen, Netherlands. With his parents background he was exposed to acting quite early, and he was already acting on stage when he was five years old. He did not like the discipline that the school imposed on him and he ran away from home at age 15, hiding on a Dutch Navy freighter. This episode in his life taught him many things, exposing him to different peoples and cultures and he also discovered that he had a gift for languages and was able to master them quickly which became useful in his film career. He also had a passion for cars and motorcycles, which was significant since that allowed him to do daring stunts without a double, especially in the movie “The Hitcher.” Hauer is a dedicated environmentalist and had also established and AIDS awareness group called the Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation, focused on helping pregnant women and children. Hauer is the father of movie actress Aysha Hauer and grandfather of fashion model Leandro Maeder.

Famke Janssen
Jean Grey/Phoenix and Xenia Onatopp are some of the famous characters that made Famke Beumer Janssen famous. She was born in Amstelveen, Netherlands on November 5, 1964. She first came to the United States to become a fashion model and was signed up by Elite Model Management and became one of the models for fashion brands Chanel, Victoria’s Secret as well as Yves Saint Laurent. After retiring from modeling she went back to school to study creative writing, literature and acting. She’s been in Star Trek, X-Men series, GoldenEye and several others and in the TV series Nip/Tuck. Janssen’s directorial debut, for which she also wrote the screenplay, is for the film “Bringing up Bobby”. She has been appointed in 2008 as the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Integrity.

Paul Verhoeven
Science-fiction fans the world over will recognize the American movies Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man. All of these thrilling films were directed by Paul Verhoeven, who hails from Amsterdam where he was born on July 18, 1938. Verhoeven made his mark and has been widely recognized for his films that explores social satire, violence and sex. He became widely known for these types of films that some films he did that were mellow in tone were not very well received. He was a good student, graduating with degrees in physics and mathematics and he also enjoyed watching American films together with his father, a school teacher. Perhaps his experience as an eye witness to what wars can do to a country and its people had a lasting impact on him and were expressed in the explosive films he made. He does not have a degree in biblical studies although he is a member of the Jesus Seminar. Verhoeven has also written a few books, including the 2007 Jesus of Nazareth, together with his biographer Rob Van Scheers. It was said that it was the completion of the research done for the movie, Jesus: The Man.

Vincent van Gogh
“Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and grey,” goes the lyrics of the song Don McLean wrote and dedicated to Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent Willem van Gogh. Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Zundert. He loved art as a child although he also wanted to be a pastor. He worked for an art dealer and had the chance to travel to The Hague, Paris and London. While working as a missionary in a mining town in 1885 he painted his first painting The Potato Eaters. Its colors were quite somber, consisting of earth colors. His later paintings became increasingly brighter when he moved to France and became amazed by the amount of sunshine in the region. He made a total of 2, 000 works consisting of 900 painting plus various sketches and drawings. He lived poorly all his life, subsisting on allowances sent by his brother Theo. He had a liaison with a prostitute and an older woman that met opposition from his family. He had bouts of sexually transmitted disease and malnutrition, as well as mental illness and anxiety. He wanted recognition and hoped that painters Bock and Gauguin will help him. Feeling depressed on day, he cut off his left ear and gave it to a prostitute. Gauguin was able to bring him to the hospital. As Van Gogh’s mental health continued to decline he checked into the Saint-Rémy asylum in 1889, where he painted some of his popular works, including “The Starry Night.” He left the asylum in 1890 and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near Theo and his physician. He suffered a severe setback from his illnesses thought and was increasing frustrated and in the end, at age 37 he shot himself on the chest. Vincent van Gogh ended his tragic on July 27, 1890 and the world later acknowledged his brilliance as an artist, a recognition he so desperately craved when he was still alive.

Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian was named Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan when he was born in Amersfoort on March 7, 1872. He evolved a painting style, which he called Neo-Plasticism, which is characterized by using a canvas painted in white where an irregular grid of black vertical and horizontal lines were added. In some of the boxes formed by the grid lines primary colors, red, yellow and blue were painted. Mondrian, who used his nickname “Piet” used to be a primary school teacher while practicing his painting. He started out as an impressionist painter, creating pastoral landscapes. He began to experiment with abstract painting around the early part of the 1900s and changed the spelling of his last name to “Mondrian” in 1911 when he moved to Paris. Most of Mondrian’s known and famous works are his abstracts, most of which are entitled Composition and followed either by a letter, number or the names of the colors used. His canvases were not flat, however, even if that is how they appear at first view. Upon closer inspection, the white background are done in small brushstrokes painted in one direction while the spaces filled with color were painted in different directions and different painting techniques to give the painting a sense of depth. Mondrian died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944 in New York.

Rembrandt van Rijn
One of the greatest painters from the Netherlands, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden, formerly known as the Dutch Republic on the 15th of July in 1606. Rembrandt was also a very skilled etcher and printmaker. He belonged in the Dutch Golden Age when trade, military, art and science in the Netherlands were at their height and are known and revered all over the world. Most of his known works are self portraits, portraits of contemporaries and Biblical scenes. Although he became wealthy from his paintings, he encountered bankruptcy due to reckless spending. His personal life was not easy either, with only his son Titus surviving infancy. His oldest son and two daughters only lived for a few weeks or months. His painting of his wife lying on her death bed was considered to be the most moving of his works. He left behind over 300 paintings and about the same number of etchings as well as more than 2,000 drawings. Most of his great works can be seen in museums in the Netherlands, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Russia, New York and Washington, D.C. One of his famous paintings, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, painted in 1633 remains missing since the time it was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Johannes Vermeer
Born on December 15, 1675, Jan Vermeer’s name when he was baptized in Delft was Joannis. It later evolved into Jan, Johannes and Johan. He was more known as Jan Vermeer, though. Although he enjoyed limited success when he was still alive he was also considered one of the greatest painters during the Dutch Golden Age. His paintings were mostly of interior domestic scenes that are exquisitely painted, with a great mastery of using light and exquisite use of bright colors, with a strong preference for yellow and cornflower blue and other expensive pigments. He used a style similar to pointillé to paint transparent colors, particularly for clothes, like his painting entitled “The Girl with the Wineglass.” He also applied colors in layers, making an object take on different reflected colors. Vermeer was a relative unknown outside of Delft, and most of his works were bought by a patron so his fame was limited. He also had eleven children which made things difficult for him financially and his financial worries were the reason why he died early. He also did not have art students so he was not recognized until after his death and his paintings were rediscovered. About 34 painting were attributed to Vermeer and the rest are still being disputed because he was one of the painters who is a favorite of forgers and because most of his works were undated and there is a lack of preparatory paintings or drawings that can be found.

Mata Hari
She was accused of being a woman spy for Germany and was executed by firing squad on the 15th of October in 1917 by French soldiers. She was christened as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, born in Leeuwarden on August 7, 1876. Her father adored her and she led a luxurious life and attended exclusive schools until she was 13 years old. Her father’s business and investments collapsed and her parents divorced and her father remarried. At a very young age she had been the object of men’s fantasies and her headmaster took a liking to her while she was studying to be a school teacher. Being used to an expensive lifestyle, she answered an ad from a Dutch army man looking for a wife. They lived in luxury and moved to settle in Java where Zelle learned the Indonesian traditions that included dancing and she adopted a local name, Mata Hari meaning the “eye of the day.” Her marriage though was very explosive, with her husband openly keeping a concubine as well as a native wife. Their children died of complications from syphilis inherited from their father. When the couple finally separated, Zelle was destitute and left for Paris where she joined a circus as an exotic dancer and used Mata Hari as her stage name. Her sinuous body movements, her naturally flirtatious character and her promiscuity and her lust for money and the good life led to many liaisons. Although she was recruited by a German official to spy for Germany and even received money and H-21 as her identity number, she never thought of doing it. While she became the object of secret investigations, she was recruited by a French official to spy for France. Her skill in speaking several languages also caused her to become a suspected spy as well as her liaison with top military officials. She was accused of causing the death of more than 50,000 French soldiers and sentenced to die although it was later discovered that there was never enough evidence to support that claim.

Anton Philips
The Royal Philips Electronics N.V. is one of the most popular international corporations from the Netherlands and one of the world’s largest electronics companies. It was co-founded by Anton Frederik Philips who was born on March 14, 1874. He co-founded the company with his brother Gerard in 1912. The business started out as a family concern founded by their father Frederik in 1891, manufacturing carbon-filament lamps as well as other electro-technical items. Anton joined the business as a sales representative and his business acumen brought the company great success. They also took the boycott of products from Germany during World War I and their substitute products were in great demand. The business diversified into different global products carrying the Philips brand name. They are into lighting, personal electronics products, broadcast and recording devices, introducing to the world the first compact audio cassette tape, the portable cassette and radio recorder, the C-cassette, the first mass storage device for PCs, the first video cassette recorder. Philips will go on to introduce to the world so many inventions, such as the laser disc, the compact disc, DVD and Blu-ray disc.

Abel Tasman
Dutch merchant, explorer and seafarer Abel Janszoon Tasman was credited for being the first European explorer to reach Tasmania, formerly called Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand. He was also able to see the islands of Fiji. Tasman was born in 1603. From his voyages during 1642 and 1642, his crew members were able to map large parts of New Zealand, some Pacific Islands and Australia. Their substantial contributions to the discovery of these islands merited having some places and things named in his honor, including the Tasman Sea, the Tasmanian tiger, the Tasmanian devil, the Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand, the Tasman Bridge, the Tasman Peninsula and the Tasman highway in Australia.

Daniel Bernoulli
One of the most prominent mathematicians of the Netherlands during his time, Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen on February 8, 1700. His father Johann was one of the early mathematicians who studied and developed calculus. His uncle Jakob was credited for discovering the “theory of relativity”. One of his greatest works was in fluid mechanics. Daniel Bernoulli also studied the efficacy of vaccinations by analyzing mortality and smallpox morbidity data in 1766. He was also one of the first to write about the kinetic theory of gases in an attempt to explain Boyle’s law, one of the many gas laws and made a significant contribution in aerodynamics with his Bernoulli’s principle for fluid dynamics. Bernoulli’s body of work in mathematics, physics and statistics are still being studied in schools around the world.

Adriaen Block
Adriaen Block was born around 1567 and one of the many Dutch navigators and private traders that helped discover new worlds. He is credited for naming the Block Island of Rhode Island and maybe Rhode Island itself, from its early name, Roode Eylandt (rood means red in Dutch) due to the island’s red soil, and exploring the eastern and northeastern coast of the United States, particularly the areas that are now called Massachusetts and New Jersey. He was also one of the first to establish trade relations with American Indians. He and his crew were the first European to enter the Connecticut River, the Long Island Sound, as well as the first to determine that Long Island and Manhattan are indeed islands. Another of his major contributions in the discovery of new worlds was the map he made of his last voyage in 1614 that showed the new features of the mid-Atlantic region for the first time.

Herman Boerhaave
Herman Boerhaave was a physician, botanist and humanist who was born in Leiden on December 31, 1668. He was credited with demonstrating the relationship between symptoms and lesions as well as being the founder of modern teaching hospital and clinical teaching. First taking up philosophy in college, he wrote a dissertation where he aggressed the doctrines of Spinoza, Epicurus and Thomas Hobbes. He also took up medicine and became a lecturer and later a professor of botany and medicine at his alma mater, the University of Leiden. He made several additions and improvements to Leiden’s botanic garden and to botanic science in general. His reputation as an untiring, knowledgeable and caring teacher and guardian spread across Europe and even China. European princes sent their children to the University of Leiden to study under him. Boerhaave’s Syndrome named after him is a condition wherein the lining of the esophagus gets torn due to excessive regurgitation.

Cornelis Drebbel
The world’s first navigable submarine was invented by Dutch inventor Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel, born in Alkmaar around 1572. He was also instrumental in the development of optics, chemistry, control systems and measurement. He also learned and became a proficient engraver. Other works attributed to Drebbel were the 1619 design and creation of microscopes and telescopes when he moved to England. He was able to design and create a microscope with two convex lenses in 1621. He was involved in the invention of mercury fulminate, a primary explosive, a chicken incubator, mercury thermostat, air conditioning and working thermometer. By accident he was also able to discover a new brighter red dye, later named bow dye which brought big money to his two daughters and their husbands.

Eise Eisinga
Eise Jeltes Eisinga, born in Dronrijp on the 21st of February 1744 was an amateur astronomer. He built an orrery in his house to allay the fears of the people living in Friesland due to the prediction written by Reverend Eelco Alta that the earth will be burned by the sun when it is pushed out of orbit when the moon collides with the planets on May 8, 1774. An orrery is a mechanical device that shows the relative positions of the moons and planets in relation to the sun. The orrery that Eisinga built is still working and is the world’s oldest working planetarium although it does not have Uranus because it was just discovered during the time that the orrery was built. Eisinga thought he can build his planetarium within six months but it took a total of seven years before it was finished. King William I of the Netherlands bought the orrery for the Dutch state in 1818. It was donated to Franeker City in 1859.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek
The world’s first microbiologist and the Father of Microbiology is Dutch Antonie Philips van Leeuvenhoek. He was born on October 24, 1632 in Delft. He made great inroads in the improvement of the microscope due to his knowledge in glass making and became the first to observe as well as describe single-celled organisms called micro-organisms that he called animalcules during his time. Van Leeuwenhoek was also the first to record his observations of bacteria, blood flow in capillaries, spermatozoa and muscle fibers. He did not write any book on his findings although his association with the Royal Society of London where he shared his findings through correspondence got his observations published in the Society’s journal publication called Philosophical Transactions. Dr. Reinier de Graaf, also a Dutch was the one who introduced Van Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society of London. His reputation as a keen microscopic observer was questioned when he sent his findings on single-celled organisms that were still unheard of at that time. He was later vindicated and the association was continued and he became a Fellow of the Society and his association with the Royal Society lasted for 50 years. His illness, which he described fully to the Royal Society, was later named Van Leeuwenhoek’s disease, an involuntary twitching of a group of muscles or myoclonus. It can be a symptom of a wide variety of diseases of the nervous system including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Van Leeuwenhoek died at the age of 90 on the 26th of August in 1723.

Ruud van Nistelrooy
One of the most successful Dutch footballers is striker Rutgerus Johannes Martinus van Nistelrooy, better know Ruud van Nistelrooy. He was born on July 1, 1976. He currently plays for Spanish La Liga for the club Málaga CF. Van Nistelrooy has a current goal tally of 60, making him the second highest goal scorer in the history of Champions League and has won the top scorer award three times. He started his senior football career with Den Bosch, playing for the team for four seasons. He had a one-season stint with Heerenveen before he joined PSV Eindhoven for three seasons. Afterwards he was recruited by English club Manchester United and played for the club for five seasons. He made 150 appearances for ManU and kicked 95 goals. After his contract with ManU expired he was recruited by Real Madrid where he stayed for four seasons, kicking 46 goals in 68 games. After one season with Hamburger SV he started the 2011 season playing for Málaga. He also had been called up for the Dutch national football team since 1998 and has been capped 70 times and has amassed a total of 35 goals for the Netherlands.

Eduard Douwes Dekker
The pen name Multatuli, from the Latin word meaning “I have suffered much” belonged to Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker who was born in Amsterdam on March 2, 1820. His father wanted him to be a trader like him but Dekker had other ideas and went to Java to work as a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies. His positions led to him knowing the all the Dutch abuses and he became very vocal about his indignation. He was threatened with dismissal and he had no recourse but return to the Netherlands. He started writing articles and submitting them to newspapers but his articles were overshadowed and no one took notice. Dekker published a book entitled “Max Havelaar” where he used the pseudonym Multatuli, a very thorough recollection of all the free labor abuses he had witnessed and learned while in Java. The book became a huge success all over Europe and it launched Dekker’s literary career. He continued to write satires and other publications and became a favorite author of Sigmund Freud.

Corrie ten Boom
Her full name was Cornelia ten Boom, a Dutch holocaust survivor who was born on April 15, 1892 in Amsterdam. She and her family helped many Jews during WWI. Corrie had been running a club for girls in 1940 when the Nazis banned her from doing so. Her family became involved with the Dutch underground movement in 1942 and they began to hide refugees, most of them Jews trying to escape the Nazi SS. It began when a well-dressed woman came to their doorstep and told them that she was looking for a place to hide since her husband was arrested and her son had gone into hiding. The ten Booms welcomed her. From then on Corrie and her sister started taking in refugees and helped the resistance movement. While there were plenty of extra rooms in their house food was scarce in those days. Through her charitable work especially with handicapped children she was in contact with a civil servant who issued food ration cards. Corrie went to visit him one night and instead of asking for 5 ration cards, she asked for one hundred. Fearing that they might be discovered, they decided to built a hiding place in the upper floor of their house where Corrie’s room was located, bringing in construction materials hidden in rolled up newspapers and briefcases. The room was accessible behind a false wall and can be entered by crawling on their hands and knees. It proved very useful during a raid and was able to hide 6 persons. Their family was arrested in February 1944. Her father died, while her other sister, a brother and nephew were released. Her sister Betsie and Corrie were sent to another prison where Betsie died. Corrie was released on New Year’s Eve of 1944. She was able to writer her book, The Hiding Place in 1971 where she described all their activities during WWI.

:: References ::
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://www.rutgerhauer.org/biography/biography.php