A Canadian man has been sentenced to almost two years in jail for stealing an iconic 1940s photograph of Sir Winston Churchill — known as The Roaring Lion.
In August 2022, a staff member at the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, Canada, discovered that the famed portrait of Churchill — taken by Yousuf Karsh, widely regarded as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century — had gone missing from the wall and been replaced with a fake.
The Roaring Lion photograph was taken by Karsh shortly after a 67-year-old Churchill gave a rousing wartime speech to Canada’s parliament in 1941. The image of a scowling Winston Churchill became a powerful symbol of British defiance during World War II. Its historical significance is so profound that it even appears on the £5 note in the U.K.
Celebrated Armenian–Canadian photographer Karsh, a longtime resident of the Château Laurier, gave the portrait to the hotel in 1998.
According to Canadian outlet CBC News, the hotel employee noticed that the Roaring Lion frame was not hung properly, looked different from the others, and had been replaced with a forgery. The framed portrait had been affixed to a wall with special bolts that required specific knowledge and unique tools to unfasten.
The Château Laurier immediately notified Ottawa police, prompting a two-year international investigation that spanned several countries across two continents.
Last year, Ottawa police detectives discovered the portrait in Genoa, Italy in the possession of a private buyer, who was unaware it was stolen. The Roaring Lion photo had been sold through a London auction house — also unaware it was stolen — before ending up in Italy, where authorities successfully recovered it.
Jeffrey Wood, from Ontario, was later arrested and admitted to stealing the portrait sometime between Christmas 2021 and early January 2022, committing forgery and trafficking property obtained by crime in March, according to CBC News.
Before stealing the portrait, Wood had contacted Sotheby’s auction house about selling a print of The Roaring Lion from the Karsh estate. He also posted on social media about his plans to leave Canada, and days before the theft he placed a two-minute phone call to the Château Laurier hotel.
Wood says he took the photo to find money for his brother, who was suffering from mental health problems.
He was sentenced to “two years less a day” in prison at the Ottawa Courthouse on Monday. In Canada, sentences of two years or less are served in a provincial jail, while those exceeding two years are served in a federal prison.
During sentencing, the judge reportedly told Wood he was guilty of stealing a “cultural and historical” photograph that was a “point of national pride.”
“It is a point of national pride that a portrait taken by a Canadian photographer would have achieved such fame,” Justice Robert Wadden says in his ruling. “There is an element of trust in our society that allows such properties to be displayed, to be enjoyed by all Canadians. To steal, damage, and traffic in such property is to breach that trust.”
Image credits: Header photo by Yousuf Karsh via Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain.
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