Pieter Bruegel The Elder - Children's Games

Children's Games - 1560

Kunsthistorischesmuseum - Vienna

One of the things that I appreciate in masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder  (1526/30-1569) or later Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) is that they succeed, through their paintings, to become true story tellers. From a bird’s eyes view these masters could legibly fit in their work an impressive number of figures which gave us a good perception of the daily life on those days. A common fact to their paintings is that the viewer looks down into a wide square zone where we understand that there’s a transition between an urban and a rural setting at the edges. On this painting “Children’s Games” the view opens, on the right side, to a long street laid out in a central perspective which leads to the city centre, where a church steeple soars into the sky. On the edge of the square towards the city opens into an arcade running parallel to the course of the stream.  At the left edge of the painting, an idyllic village appears on the horizon. I saw this painting, last July 2010, at the Kunsthistorischesmuseum, in Vienna, and I've became fascinated with the impressive number of children in this painting: something like 230 in all (according to the cathalogue), and all of them are occupied with 83 different games. The funny thing here is that all the city seems to be theirs and the observer gets an extraordinary view of the children’s games at the time of this painting. The tininess of the figures and scenes forces the viewer seeking to decipher all the games to study the individual parts of the painting, slowly and minutely, which can turn out to be an entertaining past time. Some modern art school however have refused to accept such a humanistic – oriented interpretation and they claim that Brugels idea was to create through the children’s games a parable for the senselessness and foolishness of human behavior.

Source: Kunsthistorischesmuseum