Famous Dutch and Belgian People

isn't clijsters written with an k

Well, I may not be a "cultivated western European" just a bucolic rube from the USA, but I received 5 points - without cheating. I do admit to missing the painter/pipe question and guessing at the sax question, but that one was pretty obvious even for a lowly American.

Sure, but western Europeans don't tend to BE very well cultivated (with individual exceptions of course). If the comments on JetPunk are anything to go by, the majority of western Europeans are spectacularly ignorant of anything outside of their own immediate surroundings and see that as a flaw in the rest of the world rather than themselves.

Wouldn't know what's wrong with those names. Anyone with a basic knowledge of geography (quite a few of those on this site) would know Mercator. Lemaitre basically came up with the bigbang theory and the expanding universe, before Hubble. Well known by anyone with a passing interest in physics. Van Dyck was probably the most influential court painter the UK ever had. Breughel and van Eyck had a much larger impact on art than any of the artists currently on the list. Again, anyone with a passing interest in art should know those names.

Fair enough. Too many well known painters, too little of anything else I guess. The Mercator projection was until very recently the standard map projection for non-academic purposes (it's the one where Greenland and Africa are about the same size), so in that regard pretty famous.