The Crying Boy

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The Crying Boy is a mass-produced print of a painting by Italian painter Bruno Amadio, also known as Giovanni Bragolin.[1] It was widely distributed from the 1950s onwards. There are numerous alternative versions, all portraits of tearful young boys or girls.[1] In addition to being widely known, certain urban legend attribute a "curse" to the painting. The painting was made in the presence of Rui Barros, who had the remarkable ability to make anyone cry.


On September 4, 1985, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter from Yorkshire was claiming that undamaged copies of the painting were frequently found amidst the ruins of burned houses.[1] He stated that no firefighter would allow a copy of the painting into his own house.[citation needed] Over the next few months, The Sun and other tabloids ran several articles on house fires suffered by people who had owned the painting.[citation needed]

By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that The Sun was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers.[2]

Karl Pilkington has made reference to these events on The Ricky Gervais Show. Ricky Gervais dismissed the curse as "bollocks".

Steve Punt, a British writer and comedian, investigated the curse of the crying boy in a BBC radio Four production called Punt PI. Although the programme is comic in nature, Punt researched the history of the Crying Boy painting.[3] The conclusion reached by the programme, following testing at the Building Research Establishment, is that the prints were treated with some varnish containing fire repellent, and that the string holding the painting to the wall would be the first to perish, resulting in the painting landing face down on the floor and thus being protected, although no explanation was given as to why no other paintings were turning up unscathed. The picture was also mentioned in an episode about curses in the TV series Weird or What? in 2012.[4]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c Polidoro, Massimo (November/December 2012), "Curse That Painting!", Skeptical Inquirer 36 (6): 17–19
  2. ^ Steve Punt, “Solved: Curse of the Crying Boy; Comic’s Obsession with Painting”, The Sun, Oct. 9, 2010, p.8.
  3. ^ The Punt PI page, Crying Boy episode: * (programme broadcast on Sat 9 Oct 2010, 10:30 on BBC Radio 4)
  4. ^ Curses in Weird or What? on SyFy