Children’s Games

The opening image provides an understanding of why we post this fin-de-siècle children’s games series, found in Keb59’s St-Petersburg blog, after the previous post on child carriages. But these photos are also related, for example, to the “heads or tails” played in Siberia more or less at the same time. The sign board suggests that “head or tails” was here said “hlava nebo orel”, where the orel was of course not the Russian but the Hapsburg two-headed one.


Some other games moving or at least giving the illusion of movement were also touched in the previous post or will be spoken about in another one that will soon follow.








And the complete collection altogether is the early 20th-century counterpart of that post where we spoke about the Renaissance games of Brueghel and Gargantua, two hundred and fifteen by number. It would be interesting to compose these too into a large Children’s Games tableau like the one of Brueghel was.































However, the hands of the realist artist of the turn of the century, of the photographer were bound by technique. Instead of a Brueghelian tableau on which we could watch the players together and one by one at the same time, he could record them only separately. The tableau is constructed in our heads.

“Let us not move, s’il vous plaît, I’m starting!”