British portrait painting today rests on a handful of public stages, a small group of internationally known painters and a large commissions trade that most visitors never see. The National Portrait Gallery’s annual Portrait Award, renamed and responsored since 2024, still draws well over a thousand entries a year, and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters fills Mall Galleries with around 200 new portraits each spring. Around them, painters such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jenny Saville and Celia Paul have pulled the genre a long way from the flattering boardroom likeness. This guide sets out who is doing what, how the main prizes work and where to look (checked October 2026).
The main society show: the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ annual exhibition at Mall Galleries, with a prize fund of over £40,000, including the £20,000 William Lock Portrait Prize (checked October 2026).
The oldest open show: the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, held every year since 1769 and described by the Academy as the world’s largest open-submission exhibition, according to the Summer Exhibition’s history. Portraits form only part of it.
The national collection: the National Portrait Gallery, which reopened to the public on 22 June 2023 after a three-year closure and a £41 million rebuild.
How the Portrait Award works now
The competition began in 1980 as the John Player Portrait Award. BP took over sponsorship in 1989, and the prize ran under the oil company’s name for three decades; the list of past winners runs from Annabel Cullen in 1990 to Jiab Prachakul in 2020. The gallery then closed for building work. In February 2022 the gallery and BP announced the end of their partnership when the contract expired that December, after years of pressure from artists and climate campaigners.
The prize returned in 2024 with the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills as headline sponsor, and the 2026 edition carries the firm’s merged name, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer. The first winner of the new era was Antony Williams, for Jacqueline with Still Life. Williams had been selected for the show eleven times before, took third prize in 2017 and had painted the economist Amartya Sen for the gallery’s collection in 2003. He is also Vice-President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, as Mall Galleries noted at the time, which says a lot about how closely the two main institutions overlap.
The 2026 figures, reported by Artlyst, give a sense of scale:
1,474 entries from 63 countries, with 51 works shortlisted for the exhibition
first prize £35,000 to Marc Dalessio for Jean-Denis (2025), a portrait of his neighbour painted in natural light over six sittings in his studio in south-west France
second prize £12,000 to Chloe Cox, a self-taught painter based in Manchester, for a double portrait of the foster carers Marva and Lionel Warmington
third prize £10,000 to Michael Slusakowicz for Charlie and Magda
Young Artist Award (ages 18 to 30) of £9,000 to Joel Nichols, a recent postgraduate of the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford
The judging panel was chaired by Victoria Siddall, the gallery’s director. The London show closed on 7 October 2026 and tours to Derby Museum and Art Gallery from November 2026 and to The Gallery at The Arc, Winchester, in March 2027 (as of October 2026). Dalessio was born in Los Angeles and trained in Florence. The prize has been open internationally for years, so “British” here describes the stage more than the passports of the winners.
The painters shaping the genre
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) paints people who do not exist. Her figures are invented or built from found images, set in muted colour with no fixed time or place. She studied at Falmouth and completed an MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013, according to her Wikipedia biography. Tate Britain’s survey Fly In League With The Night (24 November 2022 to 26 February 2023) brought together around 70 works from 2003 onwards. Her paintings use the grammar of the portrait, a single sitter and a serious gaze, while removing the sitter.
Jenny Saville works on the scale of history painting, with heavy layers of strongly pigmented oil. In 2018 her early self-portrait Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby’s in London for £9.5 million, far above its £3 million to £4 million estimate and at the time the highest auction price for a work by a living woman artist, as her biography records. The sale tied a very confrontational body painting to the top of the market.
Celia Paul (born 1959) is best known for intense portraits of her close family and of herself. She studied at the Slade from 1976 to 1981, where she met Lucian Freud, then a visiting tutor. Her career summary lists representation by Marlborough Fine Art from 1989 to 2014 and by Victoria Miro since 2014, and a 2018 exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. Her autobiography, Self-Portrait, appeared in 2019, and her 2022 show at Victoria Miro coincided with her book Letters to Gwen John.
Tai-Shan Schierenberg (born 1962) represents the commissioned portrait at its most painterly. He shared first prize in the 1989 John Player Portrait Award and, as part of the prize, painted the playwright John Mortimer for the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery also holds his portraits of Lord Carrington and Seamus Heaney, and since 2013 he has been a judge on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, according to his biography.
Jonathan Yeo (born 1970) shows how far an official portrait can still travel. His portrait of King Charles III, painted between June 2021 and November 2023 and unveiled at Buckingham Palace in May 2024, was the first official portrait of the King since the coronation. Its use of red across the whole canvas drew weeks of international attention and countless online memes, as his biography records.
The commission trade and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters
Much British portrait painting happens out of public view, in boardrooms, colleges and livery halls. The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, founded in 1891 by painters unhappy with the Royal Academy’s hanging policy and granted its Royal title in 1911, sits at the centre of that trade and runs a commissions service throughout the year.
Its 2026 annual exhibition ran at Mall Galleries from 7 to 19 May, with admission at £7 and free entry for under-25s. The show is selected by practising portrait painters only. The Society’s president, Anthony Connolly, described it on the Mall Galleries page as “probably the largest and most significant celebration of contemporary portrait painting in Europe”. This year the Society also welcomed 24 Chinese artists from Shengxinyu Art as guest exhibitors.
The Society added several prizes for 2026, as its own announcement of the new awards sets out: a £5,000 Almenara Collection purchase award, a £5,000 Faringdon Prize for drawing, a materials prize and a critical writing prize. It also ran a drawing prize exhibition at the University of Hull Art Gallery from 18 September to 18 October 2026. Almost every award is open to selected non-members as well as members (checked October 2026).
How the genre has changed
Three shifts stand out when you compare a recent Portrait Award hang with one from the 1990s.
First, the sitter has become optional. Yiadom-Boakye’s invented figures and the steady flow of self-portraits in open competitions both treat the portrait as a way of painting a person, not proof that a particular person sat.
Second, subjects have widened. The 2026 prize list alone moves from a neighbour in rural France to two foster carers in a double portrait, a choice the judges praised for its “powerful expression of connection, care and shared humanity”, in Artlyst’s report. Old patterns of who gets painted (the titled, the senior, the wealthy) now sit alongside portraits of carers, outreach workers and family members.
Third, the boundary between the commissioned likeness and the gallery painting has blurred. Yeo’s royal portrait was an official commission yet was read as a contemporary painting. Williams, a society Vice-President and commission painter, won the most visible open prize. The same artists now move between both worlds.
Where to see new British portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London. Free permanent collection from the Tudors to now, plus the annual Portrait Award each summer. The rebuild, designed by the architect Jamie Fobert with Purcell, added new galleries and an entrance with bronze doors carrying 45 portraits of women drawn by Tracey Emin, according to the gallery’s history.
Mall Galleries, London. The Royal Society of Portrait Painters each May; selected works are for sale and commissions can be arranged.
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. June to August, open submission, so portraits by unknown painters hang near work by Academicians.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery.Derby Museums hosts the touring Portrait Award 2026 from November 2026, alongside the world’s largest collection of work by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Regional collections. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle both hold strong historic portrait collections; the Laing staged a Jonathan Yeo retrospective in 2015. Check each venue’s current programme before travelling.
If you paint portraits and want to enter an open competition:
Read the current year’s rules on the organiser’s own page, including size limits, media accepted, whether the sitter must have sat from life, and entry fees.
Check age categories. The Portrait Award’s Young Artist Award covers ages 18 to 30; the Royal Society of Portrait Painters accepts entries from artists aged 18 and over, in the UK and abroad.
Look at recent selections. Past winners and shortlisted works show what a panel has rewarded, which matters more than general advice.
Budget for delivery and collection if selected, and for touring periods when your work may be away for months.
If you want to commission a portrait, look at a painter’s recent work in person where possible, agree the number of sittings, size and timetable in writing, and ask whether the painter works from life, photographs or both. Society commission services and gallery shows are useful places to compare approaches before you decide.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the leading British portrait painters today?
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jenny Saville and Celia Paul are the most widely exhibited painters who work with the portrait, each in a very different way. In the commission and prize world, names such as Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Jonathan Yeo and Antony Williams recur. Any list is a matter of judgement, and the annual shows are the best way to form your own.
Is the BP Portrait Award still running?
Not under that name. BP’s sponsorship ended in December 2022. The competition returned in 2024 as the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award and is the 2026 edition was the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award (as of October 2026).
Is portrait painting still relevant?
The numbers suggest so: nearly 1,500 entries to one prize in 2026, a society show of around 200 works, and an official royal portrait that became a talking point worldwide in 2024. The forms have changed more than the appetite.
