Rijksmuseum Amsterdam in the context of List of most visited museums in the Netherlands

The Sampling Officials (Dutch: De Staalmeesters), also called Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (Dutch: De waardijns van het Amsterdamse lakenbereidersgilde), is a 1662 oil painting by Rembrandt. It is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It has been described as his "last great collective portrait".

The painting is a group portrait of five gentlemen from the Amsterdam cloth guild who were responsible for inspecting the cloth, along with their servant. They were not the regents of the guild but the wardens: two Catholics, a Mennonite, a Remonstrant, and a Reformed Protestant. Their one-year terms in office began on Good Friday and they were expected to conduct their inspections thrice weekly. It was an unpaid honorary position. To compare the quality of different batches of cloth, they used 'samples,' test pieces of fabric—hence their name, "staalmeesters" (masters of samples in Dutch). There were four grades of quality, the highest was indicated by pressing four seals and the lowest by pressing only one. The inspectors used pliers to press the seals of their city (front) and guild (reverse) into penny-sized slugs of lead that were specially affixed to record the results of the inspection. They met three times a week. The "staalmeesters" depicted performed their duties from Good Friday 1661 to Good Friday 1662. Van Doeyenburg acted as the chairman of the group. The open book likely concerns the guild's accounting records. For a long time it was thought that the man on the far right of the painting was holding a bag of stamps, but during the restoration in 1991 it was found to be a pair of gloves.

Dirk Hartog (Dutch: [ˈdɪr(ə)k ˈɦɑrtɔx]; baptised 30 October 1580 – buried 11 October 1621) was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artefact to record his visit, the Hartog Plate. His name is sometimes alternatively spelled Dirck Hartog or Dierick Hartochsz. Ernest Giles referred to him as Theodoric Hartog. The Western Australian island Dirk Hartog Island is named after Hartog.

The International Colonial and Export Exhibition (Dutch: Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandel Tentoonstelling; French: Exposition Universelle Coloniale et d'Exportation Générale) was a colonial exhibition (a type of World's Fair) held in Amsterdam from May 1 to October 1, 1883. The event drew at least a million visitors and was the first international colonial exhibition, with 28 different nations presenting their colonial trade and wealth.

The event was the brainchild of Edouard Agostini, a French entrepreneur. Agostini, who had previously been involved in organizing the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, presented his plans to the city of Amsterdam and King William III of the Netherlands in 1880. The Dutch government was initially hesitant, but Agostini managed to secure funding from Belgian and French investors.