Fairmont Château Laurier general manager Geneviève Dumas explains where the stolen Yousuf Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill in the Reading Lounge was hung, in the hotel in Ottawa on Sept. 12.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The famed original photograph of Winston Churchill that was stolen from a luxury Ottawa hotel was sold for less than $10,000 at an auction house in London, within months of the heist.
The signed copy of Yousuf Karsh’s Roaring Lion portrait fetched a fraction of the price that other copies of the portrait have gained at Sotheby’s, and well below its insurance value.
Jeffrey Wood, a 43-year-old from Powassan, Ont., south of North Bay, is accused of stealing the portrait and replacing it with a fake. Mr. Wood was charged with six counts, including forgery, in the theft of the 1941 Churchill portrait. Karsh’s photo of Churchill appears on England’s five-pound note.
Lawrence Greenspon, Mr. Wood’s lawyer, said his client is out on bail and has no criminal record, and did not work at the Fairmont Château Laurier hotel, where the portrait had hung for decades on a wood-panelled wall in the hotel’s reading room.
“We are in discussions with the Crown attorney working towards a possible resolution,” Mr. Greenspon said. “We are trying to resolve the issues. It may or may not go to court or trial.”
Ottawa police allege Mr. Wood put the portrait up for auction at Sotheby’s in London in May, 2022. The auction included photographs by Andy Warhol, Mario Testino and Robert Mapplethorpe. The stolen portrait of Churchill was advertised with a list price of £5,000 ($8,900) to £7,000 ($12,500) and fetched £5,292 ($9,400) on the day.
The buyer was a lawyer from Genoa, Italy, named Nicola Cassinelli who was unaware that the portrait had been stolen. He hung it on his living room wall.
The famous Yousuf Karsh portrait of Sir Winston Churchill.Yousuf Karsh
Karsh’s photo of Britain’s wartime prime minister was thought by the hotel to be stolen during a COVID-19 lockdown, between Dec. 25, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022. Its disappearance caused an international outcry.
The original photo, signed by Karsh, was replaced with a print and hung from a wire in a different frame. Nobody noticed the swap for months. Then in August, 2022, Bruno Lair, a hotel maintenance worker, spotted that the frame containing Karsh’s famous portrait did not match others on the wall.
The hotel sent Jerry Fielder, director of Karsh’s estate, a photo of the signature on the questionable print, which he identified immediately as a fake.
Mr. Fielder used to work in the photographer’s studio in the hotel as his assistant. He told The Globe that one of his jobs was to pass prints to Karsh to sign. He said Karsh used a wooden stylus pen, and signed his name in Indian ink. He said the signature on the fake photo was a poor attempt at forgery.
The recovered portrait is set to be handed over to Ottawa police in Rome later this month so it can be returned to the hotel.
The hotel’s general manager, Geneviève Dumas, said Thursday that the portrait had been attached to the wall with locks used by museums to secure their art and a special tool would have been required to remove it.
She said after the theft was discovered, some hotel staff, including maintenance employees, were subjected to lie-detector tests and fingerprinting by police, who suspected at first that it may have been an inside job. She said the hotel has now reinforced its security with alarms and six cameras to protect the Karsh portraits, donated by the photographer who lived in the hotel for 18 years.
The hotel expects the photo to be back in its original spot by November.
Ms. Dumas said she was delighted the portrait had been found but was surprised it fetched so little at auction. The portrait was insured many years ago for $25,000, she said. “I have people telling me it could be worth up to $100,000.”
James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register, said the portrait of Churchill was sold before it was flagged as stolen, which meant it escaped the usual checks. The Art Loss Register has a database of lost and stolen art that Sotheby’s and other auction houses scan to ensure they are not selling works with a questionable provenance.
Mr. Ratcliffe said the thief had been clever to replace the print with a fake, something that had been done before in art heists. In 2015, nine Andy Warhol screen prints were stolen from a business in Los Angeles and replaced with reproductions.
Mr. Ratcliffe said prints of Karsh’s portrait of Churchill had sold for a very wide range of values in recent years. In 2020, one print went for US$62,500 at Sotheby’s while another the same year went for US$4,000. He said the value could depend on the condition of the print, when it was made, its tonality and whether it has an inscription or a signature and its provenance.
Ottawa police detective Akiva Geller said before tracking down the print to Sotheby’s, he pursued scores of leads, even checking if the photo was being offered for sale on Facebook and Kijiji.
“The information we were able to obtain from Sotheby’s led to the identity of the seller, and we were able to investigate him,” Detective-Sergeant Geller said in an interview.
With the help of Italy’s Carabinieri, the purchaser was also tracked down. Det.-Sgt. Geller said Sotheby’s had spoken to Mr. Cassinelli and “he was amenable” to returning the photograph to the hotel. “I understand he has been reimbursed for the purchase and the shipping. As far as I know Sotheby’s took care of that,” he said.