The Guardian – Tuesday 18th June, 2002

By Maev Kennedy, Arts and Heritage Correspondent.

The pupils at Downside School have every right to be impressed at their new headmaster: last night his portrait won the £25,000 BP Portrait Award for his friend Catherine Goodman.

The painting of Antony Sutch was her first commissioned portrait, and the first time in many years that the competition has been won by a formal traditional portrait.

Despite the art world skirmishing over conceptual conceptual art crowding out figurative painting, the portrait competition, now in its 22nd year, attracted 760 entries of which 55 have been selected for exhibition.

Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery and chairman of the judges, called it “thoughtful and beautifully painted”.

The Somerset school has a tradition of commissioning a portrait of each new headmaster. Ms Goodman said that she was surprised to get the job, as she is a part-time painter – she also runs the Prince of Wales’s drawing studio in Shoreditch – and is not known as a portraitist.

“I work very slowly, so he put as much into it as I did: the sittings were in his study at Downside, and it took two years to complete. He was very good, he sat beautifully still and only got up to check his messages when we took a break.”

The awards were presented last night by the actor Richard E Grant – a devotee of the National Portrait Gallery.

Second prize of £5,000 went to the Lithuanian born artist, Zygimantas Augustinas, for a self portrait inspired by Oscar, the hero of Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum.

Irish painter Mark Shields, who lives near Belfast, won third prize, £3,000, for his portrait of his wife.

The travel award, for a work proposal from young artists, has gone to Daisy Richardson and Jessical Wolfson, who want to travel on the Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing, using part of a railway carriage as a studio to paint their fellow travellers.

Click here for The Independent’s report.

There is a paperback book soon to be released on the awards, with the foreward by Richard. The info is below:

The BP PORTRAIT AWARD 2002

Foreword by Richard E. Grant
Introductory essay by William Packer
190 x 125mm, 80 pages
With 60 colour illustrations
ISBN 1 85514 505 7