It was not until the Seventeenth Century that artists began to study and paint the landscape in this spirit. When they did so, the landscape took the first place in their pictures, and the figures, if any were introduced, became the unimportant features, kept small and put in merely to enliven the scene. By this time landscape painting, as a subject distinct in itself, branched out into two directions--the _naturalistic_ and the _formal_. The _naturalistic_ was practised by the Dutch artists, who painted the out of door life and appearance of Holland so truthfully, that to-day when we look at their pictures we can see the meadows and streams, the mills and the farms, exactly as they were three hundred years ago. But the subject of natural landscape we will study later on.