The Roaring Lionthe most famous portrait of Winston Churchill stolen more than two and a half years ago from a hotel in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, has been recovered. The news, reported by the CBC, was confirmed on Wednesday by the police of the Canadian capital in a statement. The image taken by photographer Yousuf Karsh in 1941 is currently in Italy.
The security force said the photograph “had been sold to an Italian buyer through a London auction house,” adding that “both parties were unaware that it was a stolen work.” Two investigators from the agency will travel to Rome in the coming days to receive the portrait and fly back to return it to the managers of the Château Laurier hotel in the Canadian capital.
The famous work had been on display since 1998 in one of the hotel’s rooms. Its theft had been reported to the police in August 2022, when hotel employees noticed that the original had been replaced by a copy. The workers had realized that the frame did not correspond to the original and that the photographer’s signature was apocryphal. Likewise, the study of different images shared by visitors made it possible to establish that the theft was carried out between December 25, 2021, and January 6, 2022.
Ottawa police said that thanks to information from the public, forensic analysis and cooperation with law enforcement agencies in other countries, they were able to track down the perpetrator of the theft. The 43-year-old man from Powassan, Ontario, was arrested on April 25. His identity is protected by a publication ban. The suspect appeared in court a day later. He is charged with, among other crimes, theft, forgery and trafficking in stolen goods. The hotel said it will increase its security measures when it puts the piece back on display.
The photograph was taken on December 30, 1941, after the British Prime Minister had given a speech to Canadian parliamentarians to thank the country for its war efforts against Nazism. In addition to having been published on the cover of the magazine Lifethe image has appeared on the reverse of the five-pound note since 2016. Over the course of decades of work, Yousuf Karsh’s lens captured other 20th-century figures such as Pablo Picasso, Indira Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, Queen Elizabeth II and Ernest Hemingway. Of Armenian origin, Karsh arrived in Canada in 1924, at the age of 16. He died in Boston in 2002. The photographer, who had personally donated the Churchill photograph to the hotel’s management, had lived in one of its rooms for nearly 18 years.
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