Combining Usefulness and Pleasure

By : Marie Louise Valeur Jaques

Thomas Winding is one of Denmark's most productive children's authors. One of his publications in 1999 was a large picture book on the Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel (1525-69). This book is built around 12 beautiful reproductions of Bruegel's paintings. To accompany each them, Winding tells a little story about what he imagines the artist meant with the picture. Bruegel's paintings contain a mass of details to set the imagination moving. The stories are often in the form of a Socratic dialogue in which the painter Bruegel wisely and thoughtfully answers questions from the inquisitive neighbour's boy. "Why are you painting that picture?" asked the boy. "I dreamt last night that I could see all the wisdom and all the goodness in the world, but all the foolishness and evil in ONE single face. And what surprised me was that it was a child's face," said Bruegel. "Now I'm going to try to paint it in another way so that people can better understand it." The boy looked at the picture. He thought the children's faces looked as though they were not particularly bright. They looked almost as though they weren't properly alive. Or as if they were sleeping with their eyes open while they were playing. "Have they got any idea at all about what they're doing?" he asked. "Not all of them," said Bruegel. "But some of them are pretty inventive - you can see that for yourself ... and some of them are thinking twice about things. Some of them are playing quietly with each other, and then there are all the others that go on doing the same things over and over again without ever growing any wiser." The book is a splendid children's introduction to the world of art and the universe of the 16th century. Thomas Winding tells his stories with wit and warm humour and shows himself to be a pastmaster when it comes to talking on a level children understand about such difficult subjects as religion, war, love and the relationship between dream, image, fiction and reality.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones