17th Century

1666 Frans Hals (1583 – 1666)

Frans Hals the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works. Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century group portraiture. He is known for his loose painterly brushwork. His pictures illustrate the various strata of society: banquets or meetings of officers, guildsmen, local councilmen from mayors to clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlemen, fishwives, and tavern heroes. In his group portraits, such as The Banquet of the Officers of the St Adrian Militia Company in 1627, Hals captures each character in a different manner. The faces are not idealized and are clearly distinguishable, with their personalities revealed in […]

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1639 Roelant Savary (1576 – 1639)

Roelant Savery primarily painted landscapes in the Flemish tradition of Gillis van Coninxloo, often embellished with many meticulously painted animals and plants, regularly with a mythological or biblical theme as background. He also painted multiple flower still lifes; bouquets in stone niches, sometimes with lizards such as Flowers with Two Lizards, insects or fallen petals and regarded as his best work. Savery is famous for being the most prolific and influential illustrator of the extinct dodo, having made at least ten depictions, often showing it in the lower corners. A famous painting of his from 1626, now called Edwards’ Dodo as it was once owned by […]

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1689 Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

December 30, 1689: English Baroque composer Henry Purcell’s beloved opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ was first said to have premiered at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in London. Remembered as one of Purcell’s foremost theatrical works, it was also Purcell’s only true opera as well as his only all-sung dramatic work.   English Baroque composer Henry Purcell wrote his first opera based on the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the Prince of Troy, Aeneas, based on a libretto by Nahum Tate. It was first performed in 1689. Based on book IV of Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, Henry Purcell may […]

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1675 King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War, (1675–76), in British American colonial history, war that pitted Native Americans against English settlers and their Indian allies that was one of the bloodiest conflicts (per capita) in U.S. history. Historians since the early 18th century, relying on accounts from the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, have referred to the conflict as King Philip’s War. Philip (Metacom), sachem (chief) of a Wampanoag band, was a son of Massasoit, who had greeted the first colonists of New England at Plymouth in 1621. However, because of the central role in the conflict played by the Narragansetts, who composed the […]

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1609 Shakespeare’s Sonnets

all sonnets on archive.org  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote sonnets on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609.  Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard. With few exceptions, Shakespeare’s sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet—the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre. But, Shakespeare’s sonnets introduce significant […]

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Events 1690s – The Batlle of the Boyne

1690 The Batlle of the Boyne, Ireland  Events 1690: The Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. 1692: Port Royal in Jamaica is struck by an earthquake and a tsunami. Approximately 2,000 people die and 2,300 are injured. 1692–1694: Famine in France kills two million. 1693: College of William & Mary is founded in Williamsburg, Virginia, by a royal charter. 1694: The Bank of England is established. 1695: The Mughal Empire nearly bans the East India Company in response to pirate Henry Every‘s capture of the trading ship Ganj-i-Sawai. 1696–1697: Famine in Finland wipes out almost one-third of the population. 1697–1699: Grand Embassy of Peter the Great to Western Europe. 1699: Thomas Savery demonstrates his first steam engine to the Royal Society. The planet Uranus is first sighted and […]

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Events 1650s – Tay Mahal completed

1658 Building Tay Mahal India is completed  Events 1651: English Civil War ends with the Parliamentarian victory at the Battle of Worcester. 1655–1661: The Northern Wars cement Sweden‘s rise as a Great Power. 1658: After his father Shah Jahan completes the Taj Mahal, his son Aurangzeb deposes him as ruler of the Mughal Empire. Oliver Cromwell‘s troops sweep through Ireland and bombard the Kiltinan Castle in County Tipperary. William II, Prince of Orange, stadtholder of Holland, attempts to conquer the rest of the Netherlands and attempts a coup d’état against the Dutch Republic. William III of Orange becomes Prince of the House of Orange at the moment of his birth, succeeding his father, who had died a few days […]

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1647 Shipwreck Ends in a Colony

On Sunday 25 March 1647, shortly after five o’clock in the afternoon, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship Nieuw Haarlem or Haarlem wrecked in Table Bay, off the coast of South Africa. The events that followed had far-reaching consequences for the history of South Africa. 58 of the crew were repatriated by accompanying ships soon after the incident, but 62 men were left behind to try and salvage as much of the cargo as possible. They found refuge in a makeshift camp, where they lived for about one year. During their stay, the men from Haarlem came into  contact […]

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1675 Music from times of Vermeer

December 15, 1675: Dutch master painter and educator Johannes Vermeer died in Delft. Particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work, he painted mostly domestic interior scenes. He was recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, but his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death. He was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Music from the times of Johannes Vermeer January–March January 5 – Franco-Dutch War – Battle of Turckheim: The French defeat Austria and Brandenburg. January 29 – John Sassamon, an English-educated Native American Christian, dies […]

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