Thursday, June 25, 2026

Mark Dalessio wins £35,000 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026

American/French artist Marc Dalessio has won the £35,000 Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026. He was presented with at an Awards Ceremony at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Tuesday night.

Marc Dalassio with his award-winning portrait 
Jean-Denis, 2025 © Marc Dalessio
With a notably restrained and economical use of paint, Marc Dalessio’s Jean-Denis achieves a striking immediacy, where every mark carries weight. The judges enjoyed the subtle sliver of white from the sitter’s shirt that becomes a focal point, activating the composition. The portrait offers an empathetic depiction of its subject, conveying a timeless presence that feels both regal and understated.
The Judges Comments  
For the record, all my guesses of who would win what were CORRECT!

The two youngest award winners
- just before they announced the prizes!

Below you can see 
  • photos of the artists with their portraits which were taken Tuesday evening.
  • Plus a photo of them receiving their award. Apologies for the side on view. I usually pick a better spot.
[I was hoping for access to the NPG ones being taken by the photographer who was in prime position - but for some unfathomable reason, rather than being available Wednesday morning (as they always used to be) they're not likely to be available until the end of the week.
So these are the only photos of the Awards Ceremony online so far!!]

Below are the profiles of the artists and the portraits which won the prizes. 
Words about the painting and what the Judges thought are from the press release - hence quotes.


First Prize Winner (£35,000) - Mark Dalessio

Marc Dalessio - about to receive the award from
Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Victoria Siddall

  • Age: 54 (born 1972 in Los Angeles)
  • Nationality: American (lived in Italy for a long time and now lives in France)
  • Current home: Gers, France
  • Occupation: Artist and Art Teacher (I used to check out his blog from time to time when I started blogging)
    • He spent his early career producing both portraits and landscapes while also teaching at the Florence Academy of Art. He has been a Plein Air Painter in both Italy and France and 
    • Latterly he has begun portrait painting again after settling in the southwest of France and renovating a dilapidated artist’s studio. This provided the right conditions for his method of portrait painting. He is now working on commission from life and painting fast! 
    • Tutor: - he teaches sight size painting internationally - and has done so for a long time.
  • Art education: Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence from 1992 to 1996.
  • Previous appearances in this award: None
  • how he works - based on his traditional sight-size training
    • to get back into portrait painting, he began painting self-portraits and life studies of his wife and local residents.
    • he seldom uses photography as part of his portrait-making
    • he practices "sight-size" ie the artist stands at a distance to view the picture and subject side by side to attain precise proportions.
    • he paints straight to canvas - with a restrained use of paint
    • he uses a historic four colour palette of white, ochre, red and black oils, sometimes with a red lake for glazing
  • for this painting:
    • he painted his neighbour Jean-Denis - in response to his request for a portrait. 
    • The portrait was completed over six sittings, with Dalessio playing podcasts for Jean-Denis to keep him awake as he didn’t find posing very interesting.
    • He painted his sitter as he arrived, in his elegant black coat and scarf, a sliver of a white shirt just visible beneath.
    • filmed Jean-Denis to serve as an aide-mémoire of his subject’s various facial expressions when he was unavailable for sittings.

Second Prize Winner (£12,000) - Chloe Cox

Chloe Cox’s What’s Mine is Yours is a beautifully painted and life-affirming double portrait, notable for its exceptionally accomplished technique and sensitivity of handling. The judges were particularly struck by the sense of joy and uplift that the work conveys, as well as the palpable connection and love between the sitters. The Judges
Second Prize
Chloe Cox with her portrait What’s Mine is Yours (2024)
© Chloe Cox
  • Name: Chloe Cox. She also goes by the artist name ‘Cee’ or ‘ArtCee’.
  • Age: very young?
  • Nationality: British
  • Occupation: she has a full time job and paints on the weekend and in the evening
  • Current home: Manchester
  • Art education: ?
  • Artistic imperative: to represent the BAME community as honestly and sympathetically as possible to increase their sense of belonging in British history, arts and culture.
What's Mine is Yours, 2024 by Chloe Cox
Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm | 35.4 x 23.6 in
© Chloe Cox
  • I always work from reference photos, and I’ve become quite particular about using my own rather than ones clients provide. For me, it is important to control the lighting so I get the detail I need to paint realistic portraits. I also like to meet the person I’m painting to get a sense of who they are and how they want to be portrayed. My partner is an amazing photographer, so these days we often travel together to meet the sitter. He captures the photos while I direct the composition
  • How she works:
    • She meets her sitters and gets her photos
    • Next she sketched the composition on the canvas 
    • Next she painstakingly built the portrait with several layers of oil paint, gradually bringing out the light and refining the images with finer brushes.
    • This is a blog post describing her process from https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2025/11/05/chloe-cox-real-refined/
  • Recent Commissions:
    • In 2024, Cox took part in the BBC documentary series Extraordinary Portraits (Link is to the episode). It was during the series that she was paired with the sitters in this portrait, Marva and Lionel Warmington, a Birmingham couple who have fostered more than 200 teenagers over the past 30 years. Cox visited their home with the TV crew to learn about their experiences and meet some of their foster children. Conversations form the foundation of Cox’s sittings, giving her time to get to know her sitters.
    • a portrait of Professor Patricia Daley for Jesus College, University of Oxford
    • portrait of a member of the Windrush Generation for an English Heritage commission series Painting our Past: The African Diaspora in England. She got to meet HM King Charles III
Chloe Cox after receiving her award.

My next bet is that she gets awarded the Commission! She's obviously very good at doing them. 

Third Prize Winner (£10,000) - Michael Slusakowicz

The judges thought that Michael Slusakowicz’s "Charlie and Magda" is a seductive and visually arresting portrait, distinguished by its impressive execution and beautiful use of colour. Eschewing a classical approach, the work is characterised by a striking originality.
Michael Slusakowicz with his portrait ofCharlie and Magda, 2026
© Michael Slusakowicz
Charlie and Magda (2026) depicts two of the artist’s friends in a pensive moment. Luminous, stylised leaves and blooms, reflective of the artist’s admiration for the opulent verdure of Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau, add a dream-like quality to the emotionally charged scene.
  • Age: 40ish?
  • Nationality: Polish (born in Krakow)
  • Current home: London
  • Occupation: painting (but he has also been a performance and video artist)
  • Art education: 
    • Moved to the UK in 20052008-2011 BA Painting,Camberwell College of Arts/University of the Arts London
    • 2007-2008 Artist in Residence/Manchester College of Art and Technology
    • 2006-2007 Foundation Diploma in Art and Design/Manchester College of Art and Technology
  • how he works:
    • he typically begins each portrait with sketches and photographs that he uploads to his laptop and turns into a digital collage. 
    • He then translates the images onto canvas using crisp, brights oils straight from the tube, sometimes combined with hand-mixed neon paints.
    • For his subjects’ faces, he blends colours to create a smooth transition from one shade to another and uses thin, diluted layers of paint to achieve a translucent effect. 
    • His starting point for Charlie and Magda was a previously unfinished painting that he coated with a green wash and scanned onto his computer, then juxtaposing the figures and foliage before choosing the final colour palette.
He showed me how you could still see that it was his original intention to paint the background a mid blue colour - before he changed it to green - and that this was still present on the side of the painting - which I thought I'd photographed, but can't find.


Young Artist Award (£9,000) Joel Nichols


In "In Our Borderlands" by Joel Nichols the judges admired the painting’s distinctly mysterious atmosphere and the technically accomplished use of light, which shapes both the psychological depth of the sitter and the spatial complexity of the composition.

In Our Borderlands, 2025 by Joel Nichols
(Oil on canvas 1220mm x 1520mm)
© Joel Nichols
Rooted in their biracial Jamaican heritage and queer identity, their work explores intimacy, vulnerability, and the politics of representation. Through large-scale portraits and process-based inquiry, Joel challenges fixed narratives and conventional roles between artist, subject, and viewer.
  • How they work:
    • It began with several days spent sketching before committing to paint.
    • Nichols works slowly in a meticulous process of sustained attentiveness that they liken to an ‘act of care’ towards the subject.
    • The majority of the artist’s time and energy was devoted to capturing Jo’s distinctive, steady gaze and the ephemeral, sometimes photographic qualities of the light using precise, fine brushstrokes and an airbrush.
    • The detail of the figure is offset by a blended, soft-focus background, rendered to near-abstraction to create a depth of field and concentrate all attention upon the sitter.
For Nichols, the value of a portrait comes from the process of creation rather than the image itself. As such, their portraits become less about producing a fixed image and more about exploring identity, agency and the dynamics of looking.
TOMORROW is my review of the exhibition - which will highlight themes I spotted in the exhibition


REFERENCE: The Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery


These are all my previous blog posts going back to 2007 about this competition
There were no Portrait Award exhibitions between 2020 (Covid) and 2024 (new sponsor/change of name) due to the renovation of the National Portrait Gallery

HSF Portrait Award 2025

HFS Portrait Award 2024

2023 (no competition)

BP Portrait Award 2020 (this was VIRTUAL EXHIBITION ONLY because of Covid)

BP Portrait Award 2019

BP Portrait Award 2018
BP Portrait Award 2017

BP Portrait Award 2016

Clara Drummond - Winner on 2016

Portrait Award 2015

Susanne du Toit - Winner 2013

BP Portrait Award 2012


Aleah Chapin - Winner in 2012

BP Portrait Award 2011

BP Portrait Award 2010


Posted by Making A Mark on Thursday, June 25, 2026
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