Background

Canada’s
Portrait Competition

The Kingston Prize, Canada’s National Portrait Competition, is a biennial national competition for contemporary portraits of Canadians by Canadian artists. The mission statement for The Kingston Prize is to encourage and reward the creation of contemporary portraits by Canadian artists, through a biennial national competition for paintings and drawings. The monetary prize provides encouragement for artists to develop new approaches to portraiture.

To be eligible, an entry must be a painting or drawing of a specific Canadian person, produced within 24 months of the closing date, and must be based upon a meeting between artist and subject. The competition is not limited by age or professional status.

From the entries submitted by artists, a distinguished jury selects 30 finalists for the exhibition, and then selects the winners of the prizes. The main prize of $10,000 is presented by the W. Garfield Weston Foundation to the winner chosen by the jury. In addition there are two Honourable Mentions and a People’s Choice Prize based upon ballots submitted at the exhibition.

The competition began in 2005, with an exhibition in Gananoque, near Kingston. There were 150 entries in 2005, and 471 entries in 2009, when the exhibition began in Kingston and then was sent on a tour to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Toronto and Calgary. Plans are in place for the 2011 exhibition to be shown first in Gananoque and then at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

The Kingston Prize competition is similar to other portrait prizes held in Australia, Great Britain, the United States and New Zealand.

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