The column on "Children's Games" would have been better served by the color process which came to newspapers many years after this. Some years later Sports Illustrated ran a piece about the painting with appropriate illustrations. February 25: The Games Children Play Never Change One of the precious controversies of our time-it will never be settled, I fear-is the name of a game played at one time or another by any red-blooded boy. It's what I call the "Johnny-on-the-Pony" vs. "Buck-Buck" argument. The game is obvious. One kid stands with his back to the wall as a cushion for a team line-up of kids bending over, head to rump, to form a low wall upon which members of the other team can jump. The jumping team must get all its members onto the backs of the holding team. The jumpers try to cave in the other's ranks; the others try to hold up until all the opponents have jumped and certain key words have been shouted that mark the end of the round. On our block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn the words were "Johnny-on-the-pony, 1,2,3, Johnny-on-the-pony, 1,2,3, Johnny-on-the-pony, 1,2,3." I have come to learn that in other sections of the city and out of town the game was called "Buck-Buck" and that "buck-buck" were the words uttered to close out a round. So it comes down to your being either a "Johnny-on-the-Pony" person or a "Buck-Buck" player.
The game is as old as the hills. It appears in thepainting, "Children's Games," by Pieter Brueghel.The boys in the bottom right of the painting are playing what is obviously a form of "Johnny-on-the-Pony." The painting was done in 1560. Brueghel, a Flemish painter, is one of the all time greats. "Children's Games" is my favorite sports painting. Among others, George Bellows' "Stag at Sharkeys"; Daniel Schwartz' portrait of Big Daddy Lipscomb; Thomas Eakins' sculling and wrestling studies; and Hilaire Degas' racehorses are notable, too. But for me Brueghel has gottten to the core of the whole panorama of fun and games. "Children's Games" hangs in the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna. The Metropolitan Museum of Art sells a little book dealing with this painting. In it there are blowups of details in "Children's Games" that make it easier to recognize familiar games. The canvas-reds and greens on dark-and-light browns-consists of more than 200 children taking part in some 80 games. Many of the games, like Johnny-on-the-Pony, are easily identifiable as a form of game kids still play today. Among the pastimes that can be identified are: Blind Man's Buff, Swimming, Leap-Frog, Balancing a Broom, Walking on Stilts, Wearing Masks, Spinning Tops, Knife-Throwing and King-of-the-Hill. There's a fascination to studying a clear reproduction of the work because you keep coming up with identifiable games. A critique of the work says, "Thanks to Brueghel's surpassing power of artistic organization, this huge crowd of romping children has been gathered into a unified composition enabling the beholder rapidly to survey the multiplicity and at the same time to form some idea of the various component movements. The artist whose sublime genius directs this world of play is at home in these higher regions where the creative impulse itself is recognized as a kind of play." Brueghel was born about 1525, so he was about 35 when he painted "Children's Games." Not much is known about his life, and there is no indication of what moved him to paint this ode to childhood. It's notable that there isn't a schoolmarm or indeed any adult in the work, which has been called a "paradise for children." Critic Robert Delevoy says, "This delightful work was wholly original; attempts to link it up with any local art tradition or to track its sources to other painters lead nowhere. What we have here is a unique encyclopidia of games indispensable to any would-be historian of the recreations of childhood through the ages." The blowups of details convey something of the feeling of a comic-strip panel.If that suggests that the gamesmen of today like Charley Brown, Linus and Snoopy are in the vein of Brueghel's "Children's Games" so be it. The "Children's Games" book, written by Paul Portmann and published by Hallwag of Berne, Switzerland, appears to line up on the side of the buck-buck forces. Portmann calls the game, "How many horns has the buck?" He says, "We used to play a similar game we called, 'Longhorse.' The point was to get as many riders as possible on to the sequence of backs. Here, the object is different. Since each of the riders is clearly stretching out several fingers of one hand, we must conclude that their number is to be guessed by the boys who are blinded by being bent double. The game is a variant of 'How many horns has the buck,' the fingers standing for the horn." There is one thing about "Children's Games" that stumps me. I've been looking long and hard, and have yet to find a good stickball game.
As I say in the column, this is my favorite sports painting, About 20 years after I wrote the column, I visited Vienna. My wife and I made our way to the Kunsthistorischen Museum. We got to the room housing "Children's Games." It was a thrill to see the actual painting. In that very room there were some ten Breughel paintings, probably more of his paintings in that one place than anywhere in the world. We were dazzled.
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