Churchill, Abducted From Canada, Is Found Glowering in Italy
Like many people in Ottawa, I made a point of passing through the lounge off the lobby of the Fairmont Château Laurier to take another look at the portraits of notables that hung there.
They were a mix of prominent Canadians, including Jean Paul Riopelle and Stephen Leacock, and global notables, Albert Einstein and Georgia O’Keeffe among them. And all of the luminous black-and-white photos were works by Yousuf Karsh, who both lived in the hotel and kept his studio within it. The most famous of the portraits, a scowling Winston Churchill photographed during a visit to Ottawa during World War II, again brought attention to Mr. Karsh and his work this week. The portrait was stolen over two years ago from the lounge, but the Ottawa Police Service announced that it had been found in Italy and that an officer would soon travel to Rome to retrieve it. [Read: A Famous Churchill Portrait, Stolen in Canada and Found in Italy] A number of details about the theft are still to come in court. But, as I wrote in the article about its recovery, the thief got around international watch lists of stolen artworks by successfully delaying the discovery, replacing the original with a low-quality inkjet print that was crudely hung. The delay of eight months or so between the theft in early 2022 and its uncovering enabled the sale of the portrait through a Sotheby’s auction in London. While using rooms in the hotel as a base during the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for much of February 2022, I learned that Mr. Karsh’s apartment had been turned into a suite used mostly by visiting dignitaries. His studio, however, had been chopped up into rooms. That spring, at roughly the midpoint between the Churchill photo’s theft and the crime’s discovery, the hotel allowed me to photograph a part of the suite on 8-by-10-inch film — Mr. Karsh’s format — using Kodak lenses from the 1940s and ’50s that were also Mr. Karsh’s preference.
The Churchill portrait was pivotal to the career of Mr. Karsh, who died in 2002. It appeared on the cover of Life magazine and has been widely reproduced since it was taken in 1941. The image set Mr. Karsh on the path to becoming known worldwide as a photographer of the famous. So on my way out of the hotel, I decided to photograph it as well. The print looked very wrong to my eyes. It seemed to be an inkjet print, certainly not one of Mr. Karsh’s gold-toned photographic prints. The photo was flat and lacked the richly detailed blacks of his other prints, which were mainly hung in another part of the lounge. But I didn’t raise it with the hotel staff member escorting me, as I was already running late. And I thought that given the photo’s importance, the hotel might have substituted a copy for security reasons. Looking closely at the photo I took now, the thief’s decoy print showed other signs that something was amiss. No training in forensics is necessary to see that the signature is a crude forgery. And the photo was hanging on a cord hooked onto a crooked hanger, which is clearly visible above it. In a hotel with many entrances and exits, but few guests and staff members because of pandemic restrictions at the time, it’s easy to see how the thief might have been able to sneak his dummy print in and the real photo out undetected. But Jerry Fielder, the director of Mr. Karsh’s estate, told me that one aspect of the heist still puzzles him. Mr. Fielder, who started working for Mr. Karsh in 1979, supervised the hanging of the photos at the hotel. Mr. Karsh and his wife, Estrellita Karsh, made a permanent loan of the photos to the hotel that had long been their home, after they moved to Boston in 1997. Mr. Fielder said that all of the frames had been fitted with security locks. “You just can’t pick them off the wall,” he said.
No one knows how many prints were made from the negative of Churchill, and Mr. Karsh never numbered his prints. “That’s hard to say, because it was done in 1941,” Mr. Fielder told me. “In those days, photographs were not really art.” As Mr. Karsh gained international fame, it became possible for collectors to order prints of his best-known portraits through galleries. “It wasn’t something Yousuf was interested in dealing with,” Mr. Fielder said. “He made his living off of sittings, not selling photographs. So it’s not like he was just grinding them out and selling them.” But he said that high-quality 20-by-24-inch prints of the Churchill portrait, like the one recently recovered by the police, were “fairly rare.” In May 2022, the stolen print was sold by Sotheby’s in London for 5,292 British pounds, about 9,400 Canadian dollars. (Because the theft had not been reported, the police said, neither the auction house nor the buyer in Italy had any way to know that the print was stolen property.) That was considerably below the 85,000 dollars a slightly smaller print of Churchill fetched at auction four years ago. But whatever their number or their value, the last prints of the “Roaring Lion,” as the portrait came to be known, were made before Mr. Karsh closed up his studio in 1992. He turned over his vast archive of negatives, including early ones on potentially explosive nitrate film, to Library and Archives Canada on the condition that no prints ever be made from them again. Trans Canada
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected]. More about Ian Austen How are we doing? Like this email?
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