My portrait of my neighbor, Jean-Denis, won the first prize at the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This has always been considered the most prestigious prize in representational painting, so it was an immense honor to win. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the first time a painting from one of the contemporary painting ateliers has won so it was an exciting moment for our whole movement.
I’ve embedded a video below where I discuss the Platonic and Plotinian ideas that went into the portrait, and I’ve written them out below as well, for people who prefer text.
The story behind the portrait is as follows. I had recently put in a new floor in my painting studio which allowed me to paint portraits again. At the same time, the studio has a skylight, which is a higher light source than I have had before, and I wanted to get used to it before I took any commissions. I tried a self-portrait, and a portrait of my wife, but then I thought I should ask some neighbors if they wanted to pose. Before I had the chance, in a curious synchronicity, my neighbor across the street said he was interested in having his portrait painted. We made a deal where he could keep the portrait but first I could enter it into a contest. After painting him once, I decided that I didn’t want to come and take his painting away for a contest so I painted him a second time.
For the second portrait, I thought I would try to combine him as he is with the Platonic ideal of a person, which used to be a pretty common method of portrait painting.
For those who don’t remember, Plato’s Theory of Forms states that there is an ideal version of things that exists outside of time and space. In book 10 of the Republic, he uses the example of a bed. God has made an ideal bed that does not exist physically, and whenever a carpenter makes a bed, no matter how beautiful, they are making an inferior copy of the ideal bed. At this point in the Republic, Plato goes after painters who paint a painting of a bed as making an inferior copy of an inferior copy – “the imitator, I said, is a long way off reality…”. It’s quite ironic as this passage has had such a profound influence on artists over the millennia. Rather than be discouraged by their inability to capture truth, artists decided they could just imagine the ideal bed in their heads and paint from that.
This is a theory that was discussed often when I studied portrait painting in Florence as much of Florentine art was based on the practice of either working from the imagined ideal, or combining reality with the ideal. One interesting sidenote is that as I was rereading Alberti, Bellori, and Reynolds, I forgot that none of them really credits Plato with the notion. They talk about Cicero or Proclus, even though it is mostly based on Plato’s Theory of Forms. I also recently discovered that Erwin Panofsky, one of my favorite art historians, has a great book called ‘Idea’ which goes through the development of this theory, with the sources, and saves one from buying all the original texts. Unfortunately he stops with the Italian Baroque, as I’ve been trying to find the history of the theory in French art and, of course, it was so important in British portrait painting.
On that note, I’d like to place here the quote from the 4th Discourse of Sir Joshua Reynolds that I read in the video as it really sums it up well with regards to portraiture. He is discussing the ‘great style’ which he has contrasted with copying things as they appear:
It may be asserted, that the great style is always more or less contaminated by any meaner mixture. But it happens in a few instances, that the lower may be improved by borrowing from the grand. Thus if a portrait-painter is desirous to raise and improve his subject, he has no other means than by approaching it to a general idea. He leaves out all the minute breaks and peculiarities in the face, and changes the dress from a temporary fashion to one more permanent, which has annexed to it no ideas of meanness from its being familiar to us. But if an exact resemblance of an individual be considered as the sole object to be aimed at, the portrait-painter will be apt to lose more than he gains by the acquired dignity taken from general nature. It is very difficult to ennoble the character of a countenance but at the expense of the likeness, which is what is most generally required by such as sit to the painter.
At the award ceremony, I was told that the judges appreciated the ‘timeless presence’ of Jean-Denis, so this attempt at painting the Platonic ideal, via Reynolds, bore fruit.
In the video I also discuss an idea of the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus which helped with my skylight problem. One issue I have with the high light source is that the eye-sockets are in shadow and conceal the eyes. As portrait painters, we are always told that we have to ‘capture the soul of our sitter’ and that the ‘eyes are the windows to the soul’, implying that the soul is hidden in the body. Plotinus, however, said that the soul is not in the body, but rather the body rests in the soul, ‘like a net in the sea’. With this conception, in which the soul surrounds and permeates the body, the eyes don’t have to do so much heavy lifting in a portrait.
For the record, I have never seen anyone’s soul, but I find it a beautiful way to try to envisage the world.
