Haunted painting: The Hands Resist Him

We haunt each medium we create.  Case in point: an unsettling painting, with a disturbing track record.  "The Hands Resist Him" (1972) putatively depicts a childhood dream remembered much later by the artist. 

Bill Stoneham describes being the little boy in the middle of the image.  Not the creepy doll (left), shadowy door (center), or multiple disembodied hands (all over the place).

for an additional level of fearsome media, the haunted painting then infected the Web.  Let meine kleine fabrik tell it all:

The painting appeared on the auction website eBay in February 2000. According to the seller, the aforementioned couple, the painting carried some form of curse. Their eBay description claimed that the characters in the painting moved during the night, and that they would sometimes leave the painting and enter the room in which it was being displayed. Included with the listing were a series of photographs that were said to be evidence of an incident in which the female doll character threatened the male character with a gun that she was holding, causing him to attempt to leave the painting. A disclaimer was included with the listing absolving the seller from all liability if the painting was purchased.

News of the listing was quickly spread by internet users who forwarded the link to their friends or wrote their own pages about it. Some people claimed that simply viewing the photos of the painting made them feel ill or have unpleasant experiences. Eventually, the auction page was viewed over 30,000 times.

After an initial bid of $199, the painting eventually received 30 bids and sold for $1,025.00.

There's more, too.  Haunting upon haunting.  An imbrication of uncanny media.

Stoneham's been painting ever since.  One recent work, "The Body Politic," is also finely Gothic, and sadly well suited to our times.

We at Infocult Studios been touching on haunted paintings for some time.  Consider The Crying Boy, or the less spooky but still clever sneaky drawings on glass.

Comments

[HP]

I couldn't have been more than five or six years old when I first saw the infamous pilot episode ("The Cemetery") of Night Gallery, with Roddy MacDowell and the inimitable Ossie Davis.

I am sure that there are older stories that feature a painting that changes overnight (sounds like a challenge for Infocult readers), but that show will always be the ur-text for me against which others are compared.

[Bryan Alexander]

What leaps first to my mind, HP: MR James, "The Mezzotint." And Dorian Gray.

[Steve B]

Bryan, the artist John Coulthart (much Lovecraftian, you have probably seen some of his work) has done several blog posts on the various Dorian Gray film adaptations over at Feuilleton.
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/

(Seems to be down right now, hopefully to be fixed soon.)

[Bryan Alexander]

I very much like Coulthart, @Steve_B.

[Robyn Lynn Miller]

this painting is freaky and scary when i tried to copy the painting it ate my paper and it's freaking scary cause it's a haunted painting i wouldnt buy that thing well im only fourteen and im curious about finding out about how the painting became haunted is the boy in it used to be a real life little boy and the female doll was guiding him through its just creepy and weird i dont get this painting its ugly too who ever made it is weird van gogh is more my style or leonardo davinci i love art but not this kind im just curious how its haunted please tell me im really confused this is a weird painting and kinda scary it creeps me out