Children's Games

Some two hundred children swarm a town square and street, absorbed in around eighty different games - leapfrog, blind man's buff, hoops, headstands, hobby-horses, blowing bubbles - rendered with the same patient inventory Bruegel brought to his proverbs. There is no single focus and no adults; the eye simply wanders from one knot of play to the next. Behind the charm runs a cooler thought: the children pursue their games with the deadly seriousness grown men bring to their own affairs, the whole panel a near-encyclopedia of play that doubles as a mirror of human busyness.