Children’s Games

Children's Games is an oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, inscribed 'BRVEGEL 1560', in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Archduke Ernst acquired it in Brussels in 1594, and Karel van Mander mentioned it in 1604. Bruegel's own title is not recorded; around 1600 it was described simply as a piece showing all kinds of children's games. It belongs with Netherlandish Proverbs and The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, both of 1559, among his large panels packed with small scenes. One suggestion is that it was planned as the first of a series on the Ages of Man, standing for youth, but no related pictures are known.

From a raised viewpoint we look down on a town square and a long street. According to the museum, more than 230 children are playing 83 different games; other counts identify around 90. They roll hoops, walk on stilts, ride hobby-horses, spin tops, play leapfrog and blind man's buff, stage mock tournaments and a bridal procession, inflate pigs' bladders and play with dolls, while at upper left others swim and climb by the river. The children wear sixteenth-century dress and are drawn with little individuality; scarcely an adult intervenes. The Kunsthistorisches Museum calls the composition without precedent or parallel, a painted encyclopaedia without moralising undertones.

Other writers do see a moral. Children have taken over the large civic building, perhaps suggesting that the adults who run public affairs are like children in the eyes of God, an idea found in a Flemish poem printed in Antwerp in 1530. German Wikipedia notes details such as a boy aiming at an owl, symbol of wisdom, and suggests the scene may be set on Saint John's Day, 24 June. The panel measures 116.4 × 160.3 cm.