A Renaissance painting inspired this New York photographer to take tender portraits of kids at play

Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Arthur Leipzig traveled the world with his camera to document people and tell their stories, from Yiddish theater actors in Communist Romania to Sudanese fishermen battered by a storm. “Chalk Games,” 1950 But it was his sensitive, evocative images of children at play on New York City streets that first won him acclaim. And the idea of capturing these ordinary kids engrossed in stickball, hopscotch, and other popular Gotham street games in the middle decades of the 20th century came not from a teacher or a trend but from a painting by a Flemish Renaissance master. That painting is “Children’s Games,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (above). Dating back to 1560, it’s a richly detailed, bird’s-eye depiction of more than 230 children playing 83 different games in a town square, from hoops to blind man’s bluff to leapfrog. Leipzig spoke out about the effect Bruegel’s painting had on him shortly after he began documenting New York’s children’s games in the 1940s. At…