Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, 4th Baronet, was an East India Company civil servant and agent of the Governor General of India at the imperial court of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. In 1830, Metcalfe began to build the "Metcalf...

Sir Charles Barry was an English architect, best known for his role in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (also known as the Houses of Parliament) in London during the mid-19th century, but also responsible for numerous other build...

Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna of Russia was a queen consort of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, due to nineteenth century Dutch transliteration conventions, she is better known as Anna Paulowna. She was born as the eighth child and sixth...

Gabriel Lamé was a French mathematician who contributed to the theory of partial differential equations by the use of curvilinear coordinates, and the mathematical theory of elasticity. He became well known for his general theory of curv...

Nicholas I was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers (7...

Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold was a German physician, botanist, and traveler. He taught some pupils Western medicine in Japan. He achieved prominence for his study of Japanese flora and fauna, and was the father of female Japanese doc...

George Catlin was an American painter, author and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. Following a brief career as a lawyer, Catlin produced two major collections of paintings of American Indians and pu...

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. In a short lifespan of less than 32 years, Schubert was a prolific composer, writing some 600 Lieder, ten complete or nearly complete symphonies, liturgical music, operas, incidental music and...

Gaetano Donizetti was among the most important composers of bel canto opera in both Italian and French in the first half of the nineteenth Century. Many of Donizetti's more than 60 operas are still part of the modern repertoire and continue...

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the wo...

Cornelis Kruseman was a Dutch painter from Amsterdam. He continued to live in that city until he travelled to Switzerland and Italy in 1821. Eventually he ended up in Paris. In 1825, after his return to the Netherlands, he settled in 's Gra...

Ghalib was the prominent Urdu and Persian-language poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire. He used his pen-names of Ghalib (means "dominant") and Asad (means "lion"). His honorific was Dabir-ul-Mulk, Najm-ud-Daula. During his l...

Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel was a French mathematician and physicist. His studies were affected by the troubles of the Napoleonic era. He went on to form his own school École Sainte-Barbe. Duhamel's principle, a method of obtaining solut...

Sir Charles Lyell was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by sl...

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He was highly...