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A painting that has hung on the walls of Saskatoon’s iconic Delta Bessborough hotel for decades has been removed.

On the second floor of the hotel on Thursday, a massive black sheet was draped over the large space where a painting by the artist Leon V. Solon used to hang.

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The painting, which depicts French explorer Samuel de Champlain looking over the Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River, standing with one hand on his hip and the other on his rifle, occupied an entire wall at the hotel.

The other subjects in the painting are three Indigenous men. Contained to the right corner and shown sitting on the ground wearing what experts say is incorrect traditional dress for the region, they appear to serve as a backdrop to the Frenchmen.

The 1912 painting is a “fine example of Eurocentric colonial notions of superiority of the time period,” University of Saskatchewan Art and Art History associate professor Mary Longman wrote in an email.