On the eve of 1942, Winston Churchill was in Ottawa on a Zelenskyy-style rally-the-allies speech in the Canadian parliament before the next “invasion season” of WWII was to arrive, having come straight from doing the same in America (you can watch the speech here, known best by its closing line, ‘some chicken, some neck’). He still had his speaking notes in hand when he met with his next appointment, the photographer Yousuf Karsh.
In Karsh he met a man quite used to commanding in a more subtle way, and the two did not strike up the kind of rapport for which photographers often hope with their subjects. Having grudgingly agreed to stuff his speaking notes in his pocket for the photo shoot, Churchill, leaning on a chair, refused to put down his cigar.
“Forgive me, sir,” said Karsh, and grabbed the lit cigar straight out of the British Prime Minister’s mouth. By the time he snapped the shot, the full fury of the Allied leader at war was on display (see above) and the photo became known as The Roaring Lion.
It became famous, along with the Armenian-born Karsh’s soulful captures of Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, and dozens of other luminaries in every sphere of his age. Glowering Churchill was so iconic as to take up a place on the five-pound note in 2016.
I’ve written before about the Karsh collection at the Chateau Laurier Hotel where he lived for 18 years and kept his studio (and I’ve posted his photo of my grandmother on the occasion of her presentation as a debutante). In the reading room of that hotel, Churchill’s portrait has hung for the last 23 years along with five of its compatriots, including Stephen Leacock and Georgia O’Keefe.
But a year ago this week, almost exactly seventy-nine years after it was taken, and during that same no-mans-land stretch between Christmas and the first week of January, somebody snatched it.
We don’t exactly know when it happened, because the thief replaced the ‘securely installed’ portrait with a copy. It was only noticed this past summer when someone cottoned onto the wonky hanging job and the different frame.
It’s a shame to lose the portrait, though it will probably pop up again when the thieves try to cash out. Though likely to fetch a nice price, it’s not exactly the Mona Lisa when it comes to the art markets. But the real shame is that all of the other portraits in the Reading Room have been removed, at least while the hotel decides how to bolt them more securely to the walls.
Since then, the best our police have been able to do is triangulate the heist to that two-week interlude using tourist photos that either show the old Churchill or the new one. A year later, the case remains unsolved, but the suspicion is that, like the overwhelming majority of art and museum thefts, it was an inside job. Some burglary. Some investigation.
Thanks, Jessa, for this historical peak into life in Ottawa. I live about 90 minutes away, on the US side of the St. Lawrence River. The only year-long intrigue in my town involves not a heist of famous photographs but instead an investigation following a small child’s finger being bit by a bunny. I’m told the child’s finger healed quickly. The animals were not removed from my son’s after school program on an experimental farm, but for almost a year now, the kids have been kept from the sheep, the goats, the quail, and the bunnies that sometimes bite! Will the photographs ever put back on the walls? Will the children ever be aloud to pass freely through the barn attached to their “classroom” and touch what they will? I can only imagine their hands on the tufted winter wool of a sheep named Cinnamon, and what you will feel when you see again the photographs hung on the walls of the Reading Room in all their accustomed places. Some things do get put right with time.
“take up a place on the five-pound note in 2016” I thought that photograph looked oddly familiar! I have probably been exposed to that portrait on and off for most of my life, but never even thought about who had taken it, when or where. Thanks for that. Likewise, I have no idea who took all the photographs of the Queen that have been on every note, coin and stamp for my entire lifetime. Odd too that it will be a King soon.