Antony Williams wins HSF Portrait Award 2024

At the revamped National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday evening, Egg Tempera painter Antony Williams was announced as the winner of the very prestigious £35,000 Portrait Award - now sponsored by Herbert Smith Freehills, a law form and long time sponsor of the NPG.

We were all very thankful to return to the formal Awards Ceremony, given the combination of the refurbishment of the National Portrait Gallery and Covid meant we hadn't had an Awards Ceremony since 2015 - and five years is a very long time to wait....

I'll comment on the differences I noticed in a future post - but first the awards....

The HSF Portrait Award opened to the public at the NPG today and continues until 27th October 2024. It is however not where it used to be due to the reconfiguration of the gallery. You'll find it at the far end of Floor 2. It's free to enter.

HSF Portrait Award - First Prize (£35,000): Antony Williams

Antony Williams winning first prize is a testament to all those who are willing to keep trying and to keep entering and who can wait 29 years to win the first prize!

Winner of the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024

Jacqueline with Still Life by Antony Williams RP NEAC

I, for one, will very much miss seeing Antony's wonderful egg tempera portraits in this competition - I've seen seven of them. He is an absolute master of the egg tempera medium and has won a number of other awards during his career to date. 

Antony is an artist who has previously had his artwork selected to hang in the Portrait Award Exhibition on 10 previous occasions (in 1995, 1998, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020) and, notably, won Third Prize in 2017.

I had a chat with him recently and told him that I confidently predicted he would win. He does after all fall very neatly in to the category of one type of winner - who is selected on a regular basis over the years and has previously won either second or third prize - or the Young Artist Award. I simply could not see him being shortlisted for an award this time and not winning (although Michael Gaskell will attest to the fact it does happen!). I have to say I was much more confident that he would win than he was, although that might be because he's had so many entries accepted which have not won! He does know I crunch the numbers though....

As I remarked in my blog post about the Shortlist for The Portrait Award 2024 Antony had become the last of "the regulars" who has been not yet won this Award.

He and I both knew he had won as soon as they began to introduce the second prize winner. As soon as the word "Florence" was said, I knew he'd won it. I have to say he was very calm about it all. I found him in the crowd with my iPhone and was taking pics of him waiting for him to be announced as the winner of the First Prize. Apparently some of those in his party also realised he had won and were a tad more emotional about it!

The next day I got a pic of him with his winning painting of one of his regular models and some of the still life which he paints regularly. I thought it was a really interesting composition. It presents a really interesting interrelationship between the different objects in the picture plane and enhanced the potential for narrative explaining how they came about.

Jacqueline with Still Life with Portrait Award Winner 2024 - Antony Williams

Egg Tempera on wooden board;

1222cm x 668cm (48 inches x 26 inches)

The Judges were impressed with Williams confidence and mystery of the egg tempera medium. They felt the composition was nuanced and surprising. The painting sustains your attention, encouraging the viewer to unpack and make sense of the connections between Jacqueline and the still life elements in the background, creating an intriguing and enigmatic portrait.

Still life is in fact one of Antony's main interests and I think most of the paintings I've seen from him in the past in this competition had some element of still life in them. It helps to tell the story of the artist, the model and the place where they are both working. However he does also paint very intricate interlaced paintings of heads as well. His website is well worth a good look (see link embedded in his name at the top) to see why egg tempera is so very different from painting in oils or acrylics.

I've always been attracted to it because of the scope to create optical mixes of colours, and Antony told me about the way he approaches a painting like this. I have to tell you there's a lot more sitting underneath all the various mark-making than you might think!

More about egg tempera

I now know where I went wrong when I did an egg tempera course at the V&A! Below I've listed the egg tempera posts I've written for all those now interested in the media who want to know more - which also references famous paintings in egg tempera

• Egg Tempera Class at the V&A: The support and the drawing
• Egg Tempera Class at the V&A: the pigments and the grinding
• Egg tempera class at the V&A: painting with egg tempera
• plus An egg tempera day - which is about a workshop with another egg tempera painter 

Second Prize (£12,000): Isabella Watling

The second Prize of £12,000 was awarded to Isabella Watling for Zizi. 

I correctly predicted she would win second prize. I was sorry I missed her at the Press View yesterday. Every time I looked across as her she was talking with someone - and then I looked across and she had gone.

Isabella Watling receiving her award for Second Prize

Zizi by Isabella Watling

oil on canvas, 1900mm x 220mm

‘Zizi’ by Isabella Watling depicts the artist’s friend and was painted while her sitter was finishing a Master's Degree in Textiles. 

The Judges were instantly struck by Watling's portrait an the assertion of the sitter Zixi's presence. Although the work is a clear homage to the Old Masters, both through the materials and methods used and the choice of the sitter's pose, the sitter's piercings, tattoos and oversized jewl;aary pulls the viewer into the present day. The result is an excellent portrait that straddles both historic and contemporary portrait making.

Between sittings, Watling would place the dress on a mannequin so that she could continue to work on painting the complex folds of the fabric.

The main characteristic of Isabella's portrait paintings is that, due to her training in the Florentine School of painting people, she paints "sight-size" and in a traditional manner. Her painting reminded me a lot of Jamie Coreth who has previously been selected for this award and also John Singer Sargent, although I'm not used to referencing him  as an "Old Master"!

Her paintings have regularly been selected for annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Third Prize (£10,000): Catherine Chambers

Catherine Chambers won the third prize for "Lying" which is a painting of a friend of the artist at their home in Laibela, Ethiopia - drifting off to sleep while wearing his prized Arsenal football shirt.

The Judges admired Chambers use of bold and vibrant blocks of colour. They were also moved by the tender and intimate depiction of the sitter, with the artist providing a window into a moment of vulnerability.

Catherine Chambers with her painting which won Third Prize

Lying by Catherine Chambers

oil on canvas, 765 x 1130mm (30 inches x 44inches)

Catherine had a very enjoyable evening. I guess winning a significant prize so early in your career is always a great boost to the ego and more importantly your enjoyment of the evening.

The Young Artist Award (£9,000): Rebecca Orcutt

Rebecca Orcutt wins the £9,000 Young Artist Award for her self-portrait Before It’s Ruined (or an Unrealized Mean Side). Her painting is a self-portrait.

The Young Artist of the Year Award was won by Rebecca Orcutt
for Before It’s Ruined (or an Unrealized Mean Side)
(oil on canvas, 610 x 455mm)

The Judges were taken by Orcutt's experimental and punchy use of symbols such as the oversized coat and spider web to create a surreal and performative image. These carefully chosen symbols, alongside her tense facial expression and gritted teeth, reveal a sense of fragility, amounting to a brave and moving artist's self-portrait

Rebecca Orcutt is an American artist. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in painting from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts and also has been awarded an MFA by the New York Academy of Art where she was a President’s Scholar and was also awarded the Leipzig International Art Programme Residency in Germany. 

She has previously exhibited in the Portrait Award in 2015 - when she was even younger! See
Selected Artists - BP Portrait Award 2015.

Her self-portrait is about "a specific moment of despair" and questions the lengths we might go to in order to shield ourselves from the pain of potential loss.

I commented in my Selected Artists 2024 post that she has a way of painting portraits without painting faces - so it's interesting that she won this award in part because of the face she painted.

The Travel Award

Sadly, the Travel Award appears to be no more - which I personally think is a very great pity. Some of the best painting and best exhibits I've seen in previous years have been by Travel Award winners.

More about the HSF Portrait Award

I'll be writing MORE about the Portrait Award.

• my next post will be about artists with their paintings - on Sunday or Monday (this has been updated)
• followed by a list of the ten paintings I liked the best and a commentary on the exhibition. This will be published next week as I'd like to go back and see the exhibition again before commenting further.

I'll also be 

• posting photos on my Making A Mark Facebook Page and will be 
• trying to create a video of a walk around the walls of the exhibition.

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