Hals, with his masterful gift of summarizing the incidents and accidents of an occasion or a personality, resembles the best examples of the modern journalist and magazine writer; keenly alive to the temper of his own time; reflecting everything vividly, as in a mirror, yet with a discrimination for effects. Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads, is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is a “follower of surfaces.” [Illustration: THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS REMBRANDT LOUVRE, PARIS] This may possibly explain the immediate and direct hold that Hals has exerted upon modern art. The latter has been mainly concerned with imitation, casting around for borrowed motives and for an appropriate method of expressing them. In portraiture especially it has been confronted with the problem of catering to the luxurious and extravagant superficialities of a society largely composed of _nouveaux riches_. For such the grave intellectuality of that other example of our day, Velasquez, was inappropriate, but Hals’s glib, effective following of surfaces, just the thing. It has authority and style, while its essential commonness of feeling is discreetly veiled by a veneer of aristocratic suggestion, and its evasion of the problems of construction is disguised beneath a handsome showing of virility. His, in fact, was precisely the style that met the demands and suited the temperament of society in the latter part of the nineteenth century.