Winston Churchill portrait stolen, replaced in Canadian hotel

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
26 Aug 2022 14:26

The frame of the 1941 photograph did not match others in the Chateau Laurier's reading room, according to the staff at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa.

Winston Churchill's portrait (Yousuf Karsh/Library and Archives Canada)

A famous painting of former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill by Canadian-Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh was stolen and replaced with a copy at the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa, Canada. On August 19, staff discovered that the replica's frame did not match the frames of 14 other Karsh images placed in the hotel's reading lounge.

Karsh took the shot, dubbed Roaring Lion, on December 30, 1941, just after Churchill delivered a stirring speech rallying the allies against the threat of Nazism on Ottawa's Parliament Hill. One of the portrait's great assets is Churchill's iconic pugnacious face, which was acquired when the photographer removed his cigar.

Following an investigation, hotel workers discovered that the photograph had been stolen in coordination with the Karsh estate. According to a study of pictures given by members of the public, the theft occurred between December 25, 2021, and January 6, 2022.

As a precaution, the hotel has temporarily removed the remaining images in the reading lounge and has asked anyone with information to contact local police. In a radio interview this week, its general manager, Genevieve Dumas, stated that she believes that the theft was a "professional job" and that specific tools would have been required to remove the frame.

She added, “These pictures are securely anchored with a mechanism, and they’re bolted with a security lock in the wall. So there are four of those security locks, which back then in 1998 when they were installed, it was probably the most sophisticated tool.”

Robert Wittman, a former FBI special agent who helped establish the agency's Art Crime Team, also told a television broadcast this week that the theft was most likely an "inside job". The photograph could have been sold on the black market, in which case it will eventually resurface.

Karsh lived and maintained a studio at the Chateau Laurier, which was both a hotel and a political hotbed for over two decades. Karsh, whose family fled the Armenian genocide, photographed Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, and Queen Elizabeth II throughout his career. His negatives were donated to the Library and Archives Canada in the 1990s, and since then, no prints of his work have been permitted.