OTTAWA — A stolen portrait of Winston Churchill that was swapped with a dodgy forgery during the pandemic has returned to its rightful place, after two Ottawa police detectives travelled to Rome to retrieve it.
And this time, it's not going anywhere from its original home on the reading room wall of the posh Château Laurier hotel.
"I can tell you that it is armed, locked, secured," laughed Genevieve Dumas, the hotel's general manager, after the portrait was unveiled in a ceremony on Friday.
"It's not moving," she said, adding that staff accidentally triggered the alarm on Thursday while they hung it up, "and I'm sure they heard it on Parliament Hill."
The most famous depiction of Churchill, known as "The Roaring Lion," appears on the U.K.’s five-pound note and shows a glowering wartime prime minister staring into the camera.
Renowned photographer Yousuf Karsh snapped the iconic portrait in 1941 in the Speaker’s office just after Churchill delivered a rousing wartime address to Canadian lawmakers.
Toward the end of his life, Karsh signed and gifted the portrait to the hotel, where he had lived and worked.
Police said the portrait was stolen from the hotel sometime between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, and replaced with a dupe.
The swap was only uncovered months later, in August, when a hotel worker noticed the frame was not hung properly and looked different than the others. The hotel figured out when it was stolen after appealing to the public for photos they took at the hotel that may indicate when the fake photo first appeared on the wall.
CBC journalist Paul Hunter unknowingly took the first known photo of the fake on Jan. 6, 2022, when he was staying at the hotel.
The real portrait was eventually tracked down in Genoa, Italy. It had been sold through an auction house in London to a private buyer, and both seller and buyer were unaware that it had been stolen, police said.
Police have now charged a man from the town of Powassan, Ont., just outside North Bay, with forgery, theft and trafficking. That case is before the courts.
Det. Akiva Geller of the Ottawa police said when he stood in the reading room of the hotel in August 2022, he was looking up at the wall where it was once hung and wondered how he was going to solve the case.
Geller said when he travelled to Rome to collect the painting, he presented his Italian counterparts with Canadian police honours, and, naturally, Canadian maple syrup.
After taking an approximately 14,000-kilometre journey since 2021, the portrait was framed in Ottawa at the same place Karsh framed it in the 1990s.
"With great relief and a lot of happiness, we get to see the Roaring Lion returned and hung back in its rightful place," Geller said.
The portrait's return was a widely anticipated event, with a ceremony held in a room packed with attendees including Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.
Karsh's wife, Estrellita, sent the hotel a note to be read at the event.
"(The Château Laurier was) not just where we lived and worked — it was our home, and the wonderful staff became our family," read Laurence Schaller, the hotel's director of government and diplomatic affairs.
"The Winston Churchill portrait was especially meaningful to my husband because it was taken almost next door, in the Speaker's chambers in Parliament, and it has become one of the most iconic images in photography."
Nicola Cassinelli, a lawyer in Genoa who bought the stolen artwork, also sent a message.
"I had hanging in my living room — without even knowing it — an artwork whose significance goes beyond its mere beauty," he wrote.
"The magnificent photograph by Yousuf Karsh captures in the eyes of Sir Winston Churchill the pride, the anger and the strength of the free world. And it represents, better than any other, the desire for the triumph of good over evil."
And despite the "extraordinary privilege" of having the portrait hang in his home, "The Roaring Lion," he said, belongs to the public.
More specifically, it "belongs to anyone who cherishes freedom. For this reason, out of deep respect for the Crown, the government and the people of Canada, I did not hesitate to return it."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 15, 2024.
Alessia Passafiume, The Canadian Press
