ILLUSTRATIONS Ed Anderson
Curse or urban legend? Discover the true story of the paintings that have terrorized Brazil since the 1980s
1. In July 1985, the British tabloid The Sun ran a story about a house fire in northern England. The only object to survive the fire was a painting of a crying child, signed by a painter named Giovanni Bragolin. One fireman declared that there were several other fires in which only the picture of the sad child was left.
two. In the following months, the newspaper reported reports from dozens of readers who owned the works. They were part of a very popular series in the country, sold in stores throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
3. Because they were cheap, they were everywhere: The Sun estimated that there were around 50,000 in English homes. Desperate readers began sending their copies of the works to the newspaper, which organized a large bonfire to end the “curse” and published an article about it on Halloween.
4. In the 1990s, the story became an urban legend in Brazil, where the paintings were also sold in the 1980s. Here, the story told was that Bragolin, a failed painter, made a pact with the devil to succeed. He would then have dreamed of children who were tortured and sacrificed, which he would have painted in his series.
5. Bragolin would have hidden subliminal messages in the paintings indicating that the children were dead, such as a hand around a girl’s neck and one creature swallowing another. In the early 1980s, he would have regretted it and appeared on TV Globo’s Fantástico program, begging everyone who had a copy of the paintings to destroy it.
6. In 2000, a book took up the story. «Researcher» George Mallory claimed that Bragolin was Spanish and his real name was Franchot Seville. One of those portrayed would be a street kid that Seville found in Madrid in 1969. After painting him, Seville would have discovered that his name was Don Bonillo and that he had been orphaned when his parents died in a fire.
7. Don Bonillo never spoke. He was known as «Diablo», because, wherever he went, unexplained fires started. Seville would have adopted the boy. One day, the painter’s studio caught fire and the artist accused the orphan, who fled in tears. He would only be heard of again in 1976, when Bonillo, aged 19, is said to have died in a car accident.
EXPLAINING THE TRUTH
There are no signs of curse
– The paintings were produced on a large scale and had more than one author. Works by Scotswoman Anna Zinkeisen, who had a series of portraits of crying children entitled Childhood, were also at the center of the controversy started by The Sun.
– Bruno Amadio, the damn painter behind “Giovanni Bragolin”, was Italian, not Spanish, and never used the pseudonym Franchot Seville. He created the series to earn money, but he also painted landscapes and still lifes.
– The models for the 27 or 28 paintings produced by Amadio were children from Venice found in schools and parks
– There is no evidence that Amadio, who died in 1981, gave an interview to Fantástico in the 1980s
– In the 1980s, The Sun faced a bitter rivalry with the Daily Mirror, and editor Kelvin MacKenzie fed and stretched the story due to its sensationalist aspect. Most of the fires linked to paintings had a logical explanation.
– It is believed that the paintings did not burn because they were printed on high-density plywood, which takes time to catch fire
SOURCES ArticlesThe Curse of the Crying Boyby David Clarke, and Curse That Painting!, by Massimo Polidoro, book Incursion into the Unknownby Antonio Berlanga Gomez
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