500 Portraits

BP Portrait Award

Plot

This beautifully produced compendium features 500 paintings from many of the bestfigurative artists active over the last twenty-one years. Reflecting the diverse methods ofcontemporary portrait practice, the book includes a dazzling array of styles, fromimmaculate photorealism to intense expressionism.The BP Portrait Award is one of Britain’s most prestigious art prizes, and each yearnearly 300,000 people visit the exhibition based on the competition. It has acted as aspringboard for many painters’ careers, notably the prize-winners who have beensubsequently commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint an eminent sitter.This book includes full-colour reproductions of many of those commissions – includingpaintings of Dame Helen Mirren, J.K. Rowling, Sir Michael Caine, Fiona Shaw, Sir IanMcKellen, Sir Paul Smith and Dame Cicely Saunders.As well as these high-profile commissions, the book features an inspiring wealth ofsubjects: unflinching self-portraits, warm portrayals of children and babies,conversation pieces, studies of people at home and at work – a rich and variedselection of hundreds of faces by some of the finest portrait painters of our time.