Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT BOTH Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The difference is inherent in their characters—Hals the raconteur; Rembrandt the thinker. 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." 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 o...