The Spanish victory at Breda was a rare success for Spanish troops over the Dutch in the Eighty Years' War. The moment was commemorated by the court painter to King Philip IV, Diego Velazquez. The life-size painting shows the Dutch surrender, which glorifies the Spanish troops and shows the Spaniards as both victorious and magnanimous. This painting also serves as a prime example of Velazquez' great skill with color and composition.

Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.

Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age of painting during the seventeenth century. His style was notable for featuring bold colors and dramatic lighting in "everyday scenes" of commonfolk, as well as portraits and scenes out of the Bible. Almost all of Rembrandt's paintings featured people, and he almost never drew landscapes.

Francisco Goya is from Spain.

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was one of the very first well known American painters. During the Revolutionary Era, Stuart became essentially the "court painter" of the early American government because of his portraits of leading figures. Stuart's work includes the most famous portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and many other of America's Founding Fathers.

Watteau's specialty was fête galante, a style of eighteenth-century painting that depicts aristocrats walking through forested scenes. Ceiling paintings were painted by Giambattista Tiepolo. Satirical pieces during the Rococo era included William Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode. Grand manner is a style of eighteenth-century works that featured figures posed as ancient statues or accompanied by classical architectural features. 

Johannes Vermeer, one of the most renowned painters of the Dutch Golden Age, is known for his portrayals of genre scenes that most often depicted women. Many of his compositions show a single figure framed by the light emanating from a window.

Image: Young Woman with a Water Pitcher by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1660–1665). From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_a_Water_Jug#/media/File:Jan_Vermeer_van_Delft_019.jpg.

While Diego Velazquez had many similarities to his Baroque contemporaries, notably a strong contrast between light and dark elements, he also had a number of distinguishing characteristics. Velazquez' portrayal of his subjects was much more unflinching than other seventeenth century artists, demonstrating an ability to accurately but sympathetically show the faults of his subjects. Additionally, the color palette used by the Spaniard Velazquez was more muted than painters in other parts of Europe in the 1600s.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Meninas,_by_Diego_Velázquez,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg

While an etching rather than his signature paintings, this work shows many hallmarks of the artist Rembrandt van Rijn, which were also signature elements of his fellow artists working in the Netherlands. Self-Portrait with Saskia, which is shown here, not only pictures Rembrandt, but also focuses on everyday people in everyday clothing. The work also has a number of examples of strong contrast, which was a hallmark of Dutch Golden Age painting.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self-portrait_with_Saskia.jpg

This work by Rembrandt van Rijn, known as Self-Portrait with Saskia, is one of his many etchings. An etching, which involved carving an image into a metal plate, then printing it onto paper, was an easier work to produce than a large-scale painting and easier to reproduce. Etchings were much more commonly passed around Europe, making Rembrandt's fame in the seventeenth century much more than his paintings.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self-portrait_with_Saskia.jpg