Wikimedia Commons (see my Lines and Colors post here), the huge, mostly public domain image repository associated with Wikipedia, has a nice aspect to its organization that lets you view a broad variety of art organized by year, decade or century.
These are just a few paintings from the (apparently splendiferous) decade of the 1660s. As much as I love 19th century painting, I think I have to vote for the 17th century as the high water mark for the art of painting.
Here is the Wikimedia Commons page for 1660s paintings.
Unfortunately, like many (if not most) repositories of art images on the web, many of the images you encounter will have color that is way off (sometimes way way off) from the original painting. One thing about Wikimedia Commons, however, is that you will often see several different versions of the same image, with different color casts. (Hint: if the image of a painting from the 17th century has colors that look like they fell off an Impressionist’s palette, it’s a pretty good guess way off.)
See my similar Lines and Colors post on 1880s paintings from Wikimedia Commons.
(Images above: Gerard Dou, Johannes Vermeer, Adriaen van Ostrade, Caesar van Everdingen, Ludolf Bakhuizen, Willem Kalf, Rembrandt van Rijn, Cornelis de Man, Edwaert Collier, Gabriel Metsu, Oieter de Hooch, Christoph Paudiss)
