This painting represents a subject most famously associated with Marten van Cleve’s contemporary, the great Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose celebrated, and highly unusual, depiction of Children’s Games of 1560 is today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). As the present panel makes clear, however, Van Cleve’s originality and invention in his treatment of a theme with a long history of representation in the Low Countries, was in many ways independent of the influence of Bruegel. This design exists in five other versions, testament to Van Cleve’s contribution to the popularity of the subject: four are in museums (State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; Musée Municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz), while a fifth was formerly in the Faggin collection, sold Sotheby’s, 9 June 1983, lot 11. Of these, the painting in the Hermitage, its condition compromised through transferral from panel to canvas, is the only other work of this type to be of undisputed authorship, leaving the present panel as the best example to remain in private hands.

Children’s games have been portrayed in Netherlandish art since at least the fifteenth century, firstly in the illuminations of Books of Hours, in calendrical images representing seasonal activities associated with different times of the year. Later in the sixteenth century, artists began to employ depictions of children’s games as a means of exploring a variety of allegorical themes. Scholarly study of these images not only as historical documents, but also as pictures full of meaning, has been wide-ranging. Interpretations of the many and various pastimes in Bruegel’s painting, and by extension the present work, include reading the whole as an illustration of Summer or the Ages of Man, but an intended association between childhood and folly, satirizing human behavior in later life, seems indisputable.¹ The game of blindman’s buff found upper center in the present painting, for example, where a girl with her head covered by a blue cloak attempts to catch a boy, her make-believe “bridegroom,” hints at the Flemish proverb “to put a blue cloak on someone,” describing the actions of an unfaithful wife, her deceit, and the folly of her husband (see right). Such depictions clearly catered to the Netherlandish appetite for ideas of morality and vanitas, and a painting like the present panel almost certainly served as a conversation piece designed to stimulate such discussions – the backdrop of the church a deliberate foil to the potential misdemeanors taking place before it.

Bruegel and Van Cleve’s paintings should also be viewed in the more positive context of the vast number of pedagogical texts produced during the sixteenth century by humanist educators, particularly in Antwerp - where there were a number of free schools, which addressed the subjects of children’s conduct, education, and play.² This last subject was widely recognized as a crucial part of childhood and development, not least by Erasmus (1469-1536), who wrote: “I’m not sure anything is learned better than what is learned as a game.”³ The figure of the schoolmaster on the left of the present work, that Klaus Ertz even identifies as a possible self-portrait of the artist, and which is also a significant inclusion that is absent from Bruegel’s painting, reinforces this reading of the spectacle. The master surveys the scene, in which the physical activities of the children would appear to provide respite from their academic studies, while providing the opportunity to learn wider life lessons regarding manners, compromise, and the vicissitudes of fortune – such as the game being played by the children to the left of the see-saw with pins and a pin-cushion, presumably predicated on chance. It is also pertinent to note the range in ages that Van Cleve chooses to depict, likewise hinting at the importance of learning within play – exemplified by the young child, lower right, who is guided in the hand-stacking game by an older girl.

The present painting depicts almost forty individual games, from spinning tops and blowing bubbles, to rolling hoops, leapfrog and piggybacks. The girl “playing shop” in the left foreground (see left), is shown grinding pigment in a representation that is charmingly self-referential, since the artist’s apprentices and children would have learned the trade through this first step of preparing paint. This motif appears to have occurred for the first time in Bruegel’s work, and is specific to Antwerp, which was – as Dürer recorded in his diary of his journey to the Netherlands – the exclusive producer of red pigment, made from new bricks uniquely fashioned in the city. However, the prominent see-saw is one among a number of games not found in Bruegel’s painting, which have clearly been drawn from Van Cleve’s own imagination and his evident sympathy and delight in the children’s pastimes. The children engaged in the “pet en guelle” (or fart-in-throat) in the lower right foreground are playing a kind of scatological game (notably absent from Breugel’s painting), in which the inverted pair would roll over the backs of two other players like a human wheel. Van Cleve even shows a child playing on its own, and a pair of children just sitting together, revealing a somewhat poetic reflection on childish relations, which is in contrast to Bruegel’s more compendious, diagrammatic work. The addition of animals would also appear to be an idiosyncrasy characteristic of Van Cleve – in the middle-ground a dog is shown purposefully bringing up the rear in “follow the leader,” while in the lower left corner the boy on stilts responds to the barks of another canine, apparently alarmed by his companion’s new and unfamiliar height.

Rather than picturing the scene from an aerial perspective, as in Bruegel’s encyclopedic composition, Van Cleve has constructed this design on several receding picture planes, separated by small mounds, and enclosed by the elliptical wall surrounding the church, which marks the rear of the space, just as the civic building does in Bruegel’s work. Depicted with a lower vantage point, and with larger and more individually-characterized figures than those in Bruegel’s work, this structure provides a more immediate impression and invites the viewer to observe the panorama as a fellow bystander with the schoolmaster. With him, we are able to enjoy studying the array of activities in which the children partake, and may interpret them equally as allegorical, moralistic, historical, and straightforwardly joyful illustrations of fun.

¹ See S. Hindman, ‘Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games, Folly, and Chance’, in The Art Bulletin, September 1981, vol. 63, no. 3, pp. 447-75.

² See Orrock 2012, pp. 1-42.

³ Desiderius Erasmus, Collected works of Erasmus, C.R. Thompson (ed.), Toronto 1978, vol. 40, ‘De utilitate Colloquiorum’, 1098.