In 1972, an artist named Bill Stoneham painted a picture that would later become famous across the internet for all the wrong reasons. The painting shows a young boy standing beside a creepy life-sized doll. They are both in front of a glass door, and behind that door are many small hands pushing against the glass. Stoneham looked at an old photo of himself when he was five years old and used that as a guide for painting the boy.
The painting was shown at a gallery in Beverly Hills in 1974. An actor named John Marley bought it. He was in the movie The Godfather and is remembered for the famous horse head scene. A newspaper critic from the Los Angeles Times also looked at the painting and wrote nice things about it, as per Wikipedia. Stoneham explained that the door in his painting stands for the space between being awake and dreaming.
