In a year when figurative painting continues to hold its ground at major institutions, the National Portrait Gallery in London has announced the winner of its flagship annual competition. Marc Dalessio took first prize in the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026 for Jean-Denis, a portrait of his neighbor painted in the artist's studio in southwest France.
This is the 44th edition of the award, a competition that has quietly shaped the careers of portrait painters for over four decades. Since its inception, it has attracted more than 40,000 entries from over 100 countries and been seen by over six million people. This year's pool drew from 1,474 entries submitted by artists across 63 countries.
Dalessio was born in Los Angeles and classically trained at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. He spent his early career producing both portraits and landscapes while teaching at the Florence Academy of Art. His reputation was established through plein air landscapes, which dominated his practice for more than a decade before his recent return to portrait painting. He works in the academic "sight-size" method, a technique rooted in nineteenth-century atelier training. As he has explained: "I use a method called sight-size, whereby I see the view next to my canvas at the same size."
Judges praised Jean-Denis for its restrained handling, emotional immediacy, and quiet compositional authority. The painting was executed on linen using a traditional four-color palette of white, ochre, red, and black. A small detail caught the panel's attention: a sliver of white shirt collar activating the otherwise dark arrangement.
Chloe Cox was awarded second prize for What's Mine is Yours, and third prize went to Michael Slusakowicz for Charlie and Magda. Cox, a self-taught artist based in Manchester, has built a practice around portraying underrepresented communities. Her previous work includes a portrait of Windrush veteran Alford Gardner, part of a series commissioned by King Charles celebrating the Windrush Generation's legacy. Slusakowicz's double portrait drew notice for its bold color and debt to magical realism.
The Young Artist Award went to Joel Nichols for In Our Borderlands, a large-scale portrait exploring identity, vulnerability and human connection. Nichols recently completed postgraduate studies at Oxford's Ruskin School of Art.
The judging panel included Melissa Blanchflower, senior curator at Turner Contemporary; digital artist and set designer Es Devlin; contemporary curator Amy Emmerson Martin; and Mary Evans, artist and Director of the Slade. Victoria Siddall, Director of the National Portrait Gallery and chair of the panel, said judges had been impressed by both the quality and diversity of this year's submissions.
Fifty-one selected portraits are on free display from 25 June to 7 October 2026. The exhibition then travels to Derby Museum and Art Gallery from 21 November 2026 and to The Gallery at The Arc in Winchester from 5 March 2027. For Dalessio, a painter who has spent years insisting that the artist's job is to observe rather than impose, the recognition brings his decades of quiet, deliberate work into a much wider conversation about what portrait painting can still do.
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