The cursed painting of Hastings

A lovely arty friend of mine called Juliet Brando posted online recently that a local charity shop in her native Hastings was having problems shifting a portrait painting.

Apparently it's been bought twice ...  and returned twice. Why?

For those of you old enough to remember, it reminded me of the allegedly cursed 'Crying Boy' paintings of the 1980s.

The story went that an Essex fire officer reportedly stated that he had attended a number of house fires that had utterly destroyed the properties but that, in each case, there had been a copy of 'the crying boy' that had miraculously survived. In September 1985, The Sun newspaper reported the story and popularised the idea of a curse. By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that paper was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers. Over time the story went on to accrue a lot of extra details such as the subject of the painting being an orphan nicknamed 'Diablo' who moved from home to home as they all mysteriously caught fire. It was also said that the artist dabbled in black magic and forced his models to cry by terrifying them and that the 'essence' of their fear became embedded in his paintings.

It is, of course, all hogwash.

The artist in question was Venetian Bruno Amadio who worked under a number of pseudonyms, the most famous being Giovanni Bragolin. Far from being some satanic practitioner, he was a respected and kind family man with a well-documented sense of humour. He painted at least 65-70 (and maybe more) portraits of crying children - girls as well as boys - many of which became bestselling prints. In the UK they were mostly sold in Woolworth stores.

Personally, I can't see the appeal. They're a bit kitsch and maudlin. But they caught the zeitgeist of the late 1970s/early 80s and hundreds of thousands of prints were sold. I regularly saw a Crying Boy in people's house, especially older people. The very fact that so many houses had one of these paintings perhaps explains why they turned up so often in house fires. 

As for why they didn't burn, the answer is simple - the first thing to catch would be the string by which it hung on the wall. If it then fell face down, most of the heat would be above it and the back boards and canvas were made of fire-retardent materials. Undoubtedly, many Crying Boys did get destroyed by fire. But they were so ubiquitous that the number of survivors became notable. The entire phenomenon was thoroughly explored and debunked in an episode of Punt PI, an investigative series on BBC Radio 4 (listen here). You can also watch an experiment replicating the conditions of a Crying Boy in a house fire here:

There are a few other myths that can also be debunked. Bragolin did not find his models in orphanages or in Gypsy camps from around Venice. Although most of his models look as they were from poor backgrounds, they were picked out at random among schools and playgrounds from around Venice and through ads in newspapers. The Gypsy claim probably stems from the fact that the paintings were known as Zigeunerjongetje - The Gypsy Boy - in the Netherlands. 

Bragolin should have become a very rich man as millions of prints of his works were sold worldwide. Sadly, however, many of these prints were produced without his permission by unscrupulous art dealers and traders in the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia and he hardly received any royalties. However, he did earn a good living from his work - he also painted more conventional portraits as well as still-lifes and landscapes - and died in Padua in 1981 at the age of 69.

Meanwhile, however, what is going on in Hastings .... ?