Contemporary Portrait Painters: Five Who Are Shaping the Portrait in the Last 20 Years
The word "famous" does a disservice to portrait painting. A painting can be known to everyone and hang in a room almost nobody enters. A painter can stand at the front of the genre and go unnamed outside a narrow circle. So I will not rank the world's portrait painters by fame. I will write about five contemporary portrait painters by a rule, set out now so you can check me.
Three of the five painted an official portrait of a figure of state — a president, a first lady or a king — commissioned and documented by a named institution within the last twenty years. Two had a major survey exhibition at a national museum in those same years. No ranking, no personal taste — only a division you can verify name by name.
That division is the comparison itself. The first three painted a real person whose portrait someone commissioned. The last two stand at the other end: one paints figures who do not exist, the other paints the body rather than a sitter. The genre is stretched between those poles, and inside it sits the commissioned portrait painting I do. Three of the five work under my condition: someone commissions, and a real person is on the other side.
The background: who painted people before these twenty years
Portrait painting was never revived, because it never stopped. The background is on the page about famous portraits around the world, and in the posts on Lucian Freud, Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait and Charles Le Brun and the physiognomy of heads. Those five painters are background, not competitors.
One of the five below says as much herself. In The Art Newspaper in July 2025, Jenny Saville said that for a contemporary painter looking at the Old Masters, they are not history but painters of his own time. She names Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach as her central influences, and says the Freud show she saw in 1988, before Glasgow, changed her work.
Group one · three who painted a commissioned portrait
Kehinde Wiley — the most talked-about commission of the century
Kehinde Wiley, born 1977, holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale. In 2002 he was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Early on he painted from photographs of young men he met on the streets of Harlem, then widened his search to cities worldwide — Mumbai, Dakar, Rio de Janeiro — in a body of work he calls "The World Stage". His website describes him as a contemporary descendant of a long line of portraitists — Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres — and says he engages the visual language of the heroic and the majestic, turning it toward people never granted it.
In October 2017 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington announced that Wiley would paint the official portrait of President Barack Obama, and that Amy Sherald would paint Michelle Obama. The commissioner was the museum, not the state. In February 2018 the portrait entered the permanent installation of presidential portraits. That year Wiley received the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, three years after the State Department's Medal of Arts. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
In 2019 he wrote that Black Rock, the residency he built in Dakar, is "the direct answer" to his wish for an uncontested relationship with Africa. He first saw the continent in 1997, and invites other artists there.
Wiley also painted Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, one of the two painters in the second group here, and the Yale museums acquired that portrait. That is not a minor detail: the division in this post is an axis, not a wall.
Other things have been published about Wiley, and I will not omit them. In May 2024 the artist Joseph Awuah-Darko accused him of sexual assault in June 2021. His lawyers said he would take "any and all necessary actions" to clear his name, and he said the claims are "not true", "deeply hurtful" and a "slap in the face to all victims of sexual abuse". In April 2025 a lawsuit was filed against him in New York, after accusations by four men. He has denied all of the claims, including this one.
In June 2024 solo shows were postponed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha and Pérez Art Museum Miami. An American anti-censorship organisation criticised the museums for postponing, arguing that it "does a disservice to the audiences". Both were published and both are written here. A court will decide between them, not a blog post.
Amy Sherald — the same commission, the opposite language
Amy Sherald, born 1973, is in the Tate collection with a 2022 work shown at Tate Modern. The October 2017 announcement gave her Michelle Obama's portrait. A first lady is not a head of state, and the difference is written here because the rule was phrased that way.
Sherald was not chosen as a gesture. She had won the same museum's portrait competition in 2016, and the commission followed. In 2023 she painted a portrait in a series of royal commissions marking seventy-five years since the Empire Windrush reached Britain — two official commissions, two institutions, two countries. The Art Newspaper wrote in 2022 that her portraits had made her "one of this generation's most recognisable and commercially successful artists" — a published opinion, not a measured fact. Her first exhibition in Europe opened in London in October 2022.
In July 2025 Sherald cancelled an exhibition of her own at that same museum, saying its leadership had suggested removing one work — the same museum that commissioned her best-known portrait.
One principle runs through both commissions, and I know it well: someone chose a painter because her language suited the person to be painted. That is not a technical decision. The portrait galleries show how it looks in each of my techniques.
Jonathan Yeo — the commissioned portrait as a living tradition
Jonathan Yeo painted the first official portrait of Charles III completed since the Coronation, and the King unveiled it himself. But it was not commissioned after the Coronation. It was commissioned in 2020, when Charles was Prince of Wales, by the Drapers' Company, a London livery company, to mark fifty years of his membership. Here too the commissioner is not the state.
The King wears the uniform of the Welsh Guards, of which he was made Regimental Colonel in 1975. The canvas is large — roughly two and a half metres by two, framed, rounded — sized to fit the hall where it would hang and the paintings beside it.
What interests me most is how it was made. Yeo worked over four sittings, from June 2021 at Highgrove to November 2023 at Clarence House, painting between them in his London studio from drawings and photographs he had taken. Four sittings across three years are not a person standing before you for hours. They are memory, drawing and photograph, holding a man steady while he changes. Yeo said the portrait evolved like the butterfly he painted over the King's shoulder, along with the public role of the man sitting for him. You can read this in the Royal Household's announcement of 15 May 2024.
After the unveiling it hung in a London gallery for a month, then moved to the hall of the company that commissioned it, among the paintings it was measured against. It is not his first royal portrait: he painted the woman who is now Queen, and the late Duke of Edinburgh. The then director of the National Portrait Gallery wrote in 2016 that he is "one of the most highly regarded and innovative portrait painters working in Britain (or, indeed, anywhere) today", and Damien Hirst wrote in 2013 that he achieves "what should be impossible", time and time again.
Those four sittings also explain why I ask for more than a photograph: a few things about the person and the occasion go into the painting. The resemblance between Yeo's work and mine is not in quality or name. It is only in method.
Group two · two who do not paint a commissioned sitter
Jenny Saville — the body itself is the subject
Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, with a term at Cincinnati in 1991. In 1994, on a fellowship in Connecticut, she watched a New York plastic surgeon at work. Studying the reconstruction of human flesh shaped her understanding of the body.
Institutional recognition in Britain was slow. The Tate holds one work of hers, on long-term loan from her gallerist rather than bought into the collection. In June 2025 a major survey of her work, from the nineties to the present, opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London, closing the gap.
In 2018 her painting Propped sold at Sotheby's in London for eight and a quarter million pounds, nine and a half million with fees — then the highest price for a work by a living female artist. That record stood seven years, until Marlene Dumas passed it in May 2025. On the art market Saville said she has nothing to say; the only thing she knows deeply is that the market makes no painting better or worse. That is a remark from someone who held the record.
What she says about painting places her at this end of the axis. Up close, she said, a conversation goes on with the paint, not only with the sitter. In a commissioned portrait the paint is the means and the person the end. For her it is a subject in its own right. In the weeks before the opening, The New Yorker, Apollo and the Financial Times all wrote about her.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — a portrait of someone who does not exist
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977, the same year as Wiley. Tate holds three of her works — The Generosity from 2010, 10pm Saturday from 2012 and Razorbill from 2020 — three owned outright, against Saville's one on loan.
Between November 2022 and February 2023, Tate Britain showed around seventy of her works from 2003 onward — the most extensive survey of her career to that point, organised with three further museums, in Stockholm, Düsseldorf and Luxembourg: four museums in four countries behind it.
The figures in her paintings are not real people. She builds them from found images and her own imagination. No one commissions it, no one sits in front of her, no likeness has to be accurate. Her titles are poetic — Tie the Temptress to the Trojan, 2016; To Improvise a Mountain, 2018 — and read as poetry, not as a person's name.
She put writing and painting this way: she writes about what she cannot paint and paints what she cannot write about. She won the Carnegie Prize in 2018 and the Future Generation Prize in 2012, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013.
The five contemporary portrait painters, compared
1 · Kehinde Wiley
Who commissioned it: National Portrait Gallery, Washington — Barack Obama
The end of the axis he stands at: Classical grandeur, turned toward those denied it
2 · Amy Sherald
Who commissioned it: The same museum — Michelle Obama; and a royal commission in 2023
The end of the axis she stands at: The same commission, a quieter and opposite language
3 · Jonathan Yeo
Who commissioned it: The Drapers' Company — Charles III
The end of the axis he stands at: The commissioned portrait as a living tradition
4 · Jenny Saville
Who commissioned it: No commission
The end of the axis she stands at: The body and the paint are the subject
5 · Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Who commissioned it: No commission and no sitter
The end of the axis she stands at: A figure who does not exist
The first three are measured by one question: is the person there. The last two are free of it, and that is why they show what a commissioned portrait does. A commission carries an obligation: to the sitter, to the family who will recognise them, to the wall. Without one, the painting answers only to itself.
Want to see commissioned portrait paintings? Click here for the galleries
From here to a commissioned portrait painting
Three of the five came to the painting through a commission. An institution or a company chose a painter, put a real person in front of them, and the painting outlasted the person's changing. That is my work too, at a different scale and under the same condition.
I have painted portraits from photographs for years. The work is done in oil on canvas, watercolor on paper, pencil, charcoal or ink, and digitally. In oil I work in layers, in the traditional European method: a different dilution in each layer produces the depth — the tradition Wiley's website names with Reynolds, Gainsborough and Titian. Watercolor is more transparent. Pencil or charcoal narrows to line and shadow. A digital portrait is drawn by hand on a graphic drawing board, which I wrote about in the post on a hand-drawn digital portrait.
People commission a portrait to mark something: a birthday, a bar or bat mitzvah, an anniversary, a proposal, a retirement, a graduation. Often it is made in memory of someone, returning a face to a room where it is missing. Some ask for a couple portrait, some for a family portrait, some for a portrait of a pet.
Each comes back to one thing, which the five painters here approach from five angles. A painting brings out things in a face that a lens does not always reveal. A photograph captures one moment. A portrait takes long hours of concentration, and into those hours goes what that moment did not show.
To commission a portrait painting
If you have a photograph of someone you would like painted, talk to me, and we will choose the technique together. You can see the techniques in the portrait galleries, and the terms on the prices page.