“He just had a way with people and putting them at ease,” And I think it allows people to feel that they can be themselves,” he said. And when you were with Yousuf, you knew right away he was the real thing. “For the kinds of people that he photographed, they could spot a sycophant or a phoney a mile away. Karsh, whose fled the Armenian genocide with his family and spent much of his life in Canada, was renowned for his mastery of image-making, both in the studio and when working with his subjects. He also had a studio on the sixth floor until 1992. It hosted his first-ever exhibition in 1936 and he and his wife lived on the third floor for nearly two decades. The remaining five have recently been removed until they can be properly secured, the hotel said.įielder, who worked closely with Karsh, says the photographer had a long relationship with the hotel.

The hotel was gifted 15 original works by Karsh, six of which were in the lounge. It is unclear when the print of Churchill, which has hung in the hotel for 24 years, first went missing. “We are deeply saddened by this brazen act,” the Fairmont hotel said in a statement, adding that it was proud of its “stunning” collection of Karsh prints. Once the theft was discovered, the Ottawa police were notified and began investigating. So it took me just one second to know that someone had tried to copy it,” Fielder told the Guardian. The hotel contacted Jerry Fielder, who oversees Karsh’s estate, to assess the signature on the suspect print. The frame on the photograph didn’t match the other five portraits in the room, all of which had been taken by the acclaimed Canadian-Armenian portraitist Yousuf Karsh, whose subjects included Martin Luther King Jr, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Queen Elizabeth II.

Winston churchill painting picture