The Crying Boy

The Crying Boy is a genre painting by Italian artist Giovanni Bragolin (a pseudonym of Bruno Amadio), produced in multiple versions in the 1950s depicting a tear-streaked child. The prints were mass-produced and widely sold in the UK during the 1950s–1970s, becoming a staple of working-class British home décor.

In September 1985, The Sun newspaper ran a front-page story reporting that firefighters in Yorkshire had observed a pattern: in dozens of house fires they had attended, a Crying Boy print was frequently found undamaged amid otherwise total destruction. The story generated a wave of readers burning their own prints or sending them to The Sun. The paper organised a mass bonfire of prints at their offices.

The mundane explanation offered later: the prints were treated with a fire-retardant varnish, and the string holding them to the wall burned through early, dropping the painting face-down before the canvas could ignite. Whether all prints had this treatment, and whether the firefighters' anecdotal observations accurately reflected the statistical frequency, was never formally investigated. The legend persists.