painting - The Hands Resist Him
Photograph by sludgegulperon Flickr.
Stoneham accepted and painted a sequel called Resistance at the Threshold. It was then purchased by painting Italian Renaissance painting actor John Marley, At some point in time after Marley s death, the painting was said to have come into the possession of a California couple, after being found on the site of an old brewery.
The Hands Resist Him, also known as the eBay Haunted Painting, is a painting created by Oakland, California artist Bill Stoneham in 1972. He reported being quite surprised by all the stories and strange interpretations of the images in the painting.
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. The sequel depicts the same characters 40+ years later in the same style as the original.
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 News of the listing was quickly spread by internet users who forwarded the link to their friends or wrote their own pages about it. An individual who saw the story about the original painting contacted Stoneham about commissioning a sequel to the painting.
The hands themselves represent alternate lives or possibilities. It depicts a young boy and female doll standing in front of a glass paneled door against which many hands are pressed.
Stoneham has entered into an agreement with the current owners of the first painting to sell prints of it in three sizes. The painting was first displayed in an Los Angeles gallery during the early 1970s, at which point it was reviewed by the art critic at the Los Angeles Times.
. Stoneham recalls that both the owner of the gallery in which the painting was first displayed, and the art critic who reviewed it, died within one year of coming into contact with the painting. The painting appeared on the auction website eBay in February 2000.
The buyer, Perception Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, eventually contacted Bill Stoneham and related the unusual story of its auction on eBay and their acquisition of it. After an initial bid of $199, the painting eventually received 30 bids and sold for $1,025.00.
Those prints as well as prints of the sequel painting are available on his website. The Hands Resist Him image has been used, on various popular culture products: .
