This paper describes the creation of a fine-grained named entity annotation scheme and corpus for Dutch, and experiments on automatic main type and subtype named entity recognition. We give an overview of existing named entity annotation schemes, and motivate our own, which describes six main types (persons, organizations, locations, products, events and miscellaneous named entities) and finer-grained information on subtypes and metonymic usage. This was applied to a one-million-word subset of the Dutch SoNaR reference corpus. The classifier for main type named entities achieves a micro-averaged F-score of 84.91 %, and is publicly available, along with the corpus and annotations.