Dutch artist takes BP portrait prize

Wim Heldens' portrait 'Distracted' has won the BP Portrait Prize, worth £25,000.

The BP Portrait prize was awarded to 57-year-old Dutch artist Wim Heldens, whose portrait of a young man won him £25,000 and a commission to be decided by trustees at the National Portrait Gallery. Second was Louis Smith's re-imagining of the Allegory of Prometheus.

The judges’ chose to award the portrait of a thoughtful, soberly-dressed young philosophy student over Smith’s portrait of a naked woman handcuffed to a rock wall waiting, with rather striking calmness, for an eagle to come down and eat her liver.

Heldens won for a portrait called ‘Distracted’ which shows Jeroen, a 25-year-old to whom Heldens has been something of a father figure since he was four. Heldens has painted Jeroen 17 times at different stages of his life. "I have been fascinated with painting Jeroen in all stages of life through growing up," he said. "Now, he is an intelligent and sensitive young man."

It is a case of third time lucky for Heldens who exhibited in the competition in 2008 and 2010. He said of his working practice: "I paint from intuition, always trying to paint that what touches me deepest, but being a painter who is more of a doer than a thinker, it is very hard for me to explain what I try to capture. I paint what I 'feel' with my eyes and maybe it is for other people then to tell what I've captured."

The NPG's director, and chair of the judges, Sandy Nairne, called the work "a quiet but evocative study" which is "an outstanding work in the midst of a truly diverse field of new portraits".

It certainly could not be more different to the runner-up. Smith's 2.4m (8ft) tall painting is called ‘Holly’, after the naked model he used for his reimagining of the story of Prometheus who, after stealing from Zeus, was bound to a rock while an eagle came down and feasted eternally on his liver. Smith, from Manchester, wins £8,000 for second place. He said he deliberately painted Holly looking up at the eagle with calm, accepting resilience. "It's a message of composure in the face of adversity, something we can all draw strength from in our struggle to make a daily living."

In third place was Ian Cumberland, who lives and works in County Down, for a study of a friend he called ‘Just to Feel Normal’. The BP young artist award went to Sertan Saltan for ‘Mrs Cerna’, and the travel award went to Jo Fraser.

Judges included Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, curator Rosie Broadley, previous winner Paul Elmsley, and BP's Des Violaris.

However, the event was not without controversy. There are some who object point blank to BP's sponsorship of the arts. Guests at the event were due to be presented with copies of paintings by artists from the US Gulf coast who were directly affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.