Children Playing Games (Pieter Bruegel the Elder) Canvas Print

This design features an oil-on-panel painting by the Flemish Renassaince artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1530–1569). It shows a scene of village life where children, ranging in age from young toddlers to adolescents, are having all kinds of fun: they are rolling hoops, walking on stilts, riding hobby-horses, staging mock tournaments, playing leap-frog and blind man's bluff, performing handstands, inflating pigs' bladders and playing with dolls and other toys. Art historians have noted around eighty distinct games being played. The children have also taken over the large building that dominates the square, which may symbolise the importance of child's play. Indeed, some have seen an important moral in the painting: mankind has often been compared to children who are entirely absorbed in their silly games and concerns. The original artwork was painting in 1560, and it is now housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum ("Museum of Art History"), Vienna, Austria.