A famous Churchill portrait, stolen in Canada and found in Italy

Ottawa, Ontario: For three decades, a fierce-looking Winston Churchill, a hand on his hip, stared down guests in a lounge at the Fairmont Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa.

It was a legacy of Yousuf Karsh, the portrait photographer of royalty, politicians, artists, actors and authors who long lived in the hotel and operated his studio there.

Just over two years ago, however, a maintenance worker noticed something wrong. The frame on the portrait didn’t match those of other photos Karsh had permanently lent the hotel when he and his wife moved out in 1997.

The photo was a decoy, a poor inkjet copy of the print with an ineptly forged signature of Karsh that had been left behind by a thief.

Now, Churchill’s portrait may end up back in its rightful place.

The Ottawa Police Service said Wednesday that an international investigation had tracked down the stolen photo in Italy and that it would soon send an officer there to retrieve it.

Police disclosed that a man from a small northern Ontario town was arrested in April and charged with the theft and various other crimes, including forgery.

“I thought this would never be recovered,” said Jerry Fielder, the director of Karsh’s estate. “There didn’t seem to be many leads.” (Karsh died in 2002).

The theft, he added, was “really devastating” to Karsh’s widow, Estrellita Karsh, who is 94. She declined, through Fielder, to be interviewed.

“She’s been following all of the progress of the investigation,” Fielder said. “She was just thrilled that it’s now official that it’s coming home.”

The Ottawa hotel told reporters Wednesday that it would display the portrait again — this time with better security. The area where it hung, along with Karsh’s portraits of Albert Einstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Casals and other notables, is closed for renovation.

Fielder, who identified the replacement photo as a forgery, attributed the photograph’s recovery to the persistence of Acting Detective Sgt. Akiva Geller of the Ottawa Police.

“It was complicated because we were dealing internationally,” Fielder said. “Now it’s been solved. I don’t quite know all the answers — and I’m not even sure they do.”

Geller, at the news conference, offered few details about the case, citing a trial that is likely to take place. The name of the 43-year-old man facing charges also cannot be published under a court order.

Exactly when the forgery replaced the genuine print is not known. After soliciting snapshots from the public, the hotel narrowed down the disappearance to between Dec. 25, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022. Pandemic restrictions at the time meant that guests were scarce in the hotel.

A photograph of the forgery taken by a New York Times reporter in April 2022 — four months before the theft was discovered and while the reporter was on a different assignment — shows that it was dangling from a piece of cord on a crooked wall hook.

Fielder said the actual print and its frame had been secured to the wall using a hidden locking mount that would have made it difficult to remove.

The genuine 20-by-24 inch, gold-toned print was sold in an online auction in May 2022 by Sotheby’s in London for 5,292 British pounds (about $6,900).

Sotheby’s declined to comment. But Geller said that because the theft had yet to be reported, neither the auction house nor the buyer, who lives in Genoa, Italy, had any reason to know that it has been stolen.

He added that the cooperation of Sotheby’s and the buyer had been important to solving the theft, as were efforts by police in Britain and Italy. The buyer, he said, had received a refund.

The photograph, which came to be known as “Roaring Lion,” transformed Yousuf Karsh from a local portraitist into an internationally known photographer of the famous. It was widely reproduced and appears today on Britain’s 5-pound bank notes. Visitors to the Karsh studio in the hotel, which was closed in 1992, were greeted by an oversize print of the Churchill portrait.

In 1941, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, asked Karsh to photograph Churchill after he spoke to Canada’s Parliament.

Both nations were embroiled in World War II, and the speech took place weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor also brought the United States, which Churchill visited on the same trip, into battle.

Karsh wrote that Churchill would not get rid of his cigar for the photo despite offers of an ashtray. So “without premeditation,” he plucked it out of the British leader’s mouth.

The unintended result was the defiant expression that came to symbolize Britain’s resistance against Nazi Germany.

“By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me,” Karsh wrote. “It was at that instant that I took the photograph.”