Cry me a river

The infuriating story of a "cursed painting"

Urban legends often have nebulous origins. As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, “Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors. Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot. And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen... Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears... They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual. They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral.”

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with urban legends per se. A lot of the time, we’re well aware that they’re just “campfire stories” that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true. After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and—as a fiction writer—I’d be out of a job if we didn’t have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true. Then you have unethical people making money off others’ credulity—and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary. And it’s worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the “Crying Boy.”

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires. Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.

If that wasn’t weird enough,The Sun claimed they’d found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville. Seville, they said, had found the little boy—whose name was Don Bonillo—after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents. The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed “El Diablo.” In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy’s tragic, weeping face?

It’s not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge’s Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered “No.” Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame. There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid. The priest was also a fabrication. Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter’s real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either. Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England. They sold like hotcakes for some reason. (I can’t imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.) The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish. Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn’t burn. The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible. So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings’ survival. Instead, they repeated the claims of a “curse,” and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn’t be burned, I have no idea. But this evidently didn’t occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies. A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, “I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now.”

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun. There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to “breathe uneasily,” if The Sun hadn’t hyped the claim to begin with—and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It’s probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off. Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower’s bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction. Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it—and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today. There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like “I would never have that in my house!” (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.) As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own. Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what’s certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.