Benjamin Sullivan (born 1977 in

Grimsby Grimsby or Great Grimsby is a port town in Lincolnshire, England with a population of 86,138 (as of 2021). It is located near the mouth on the south bank of the Humber that flows to the North Sea. Grimsby adjoins the town of Cleethorpes dir ...

) is an English artist best known for portraiture. He lives and works in

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

Life and work

Benjamin Sullivan studied painting and drawing at

Edinburgh College of Art Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) is one of eleven schools in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Tracing its history back to 1760, it provides higher education in art and design, architecture, histor ...

, graduating in 2000. He was elected a member of the

New English Art Club The New English Art Club (NEAC) is a society for contemporary artists that was founded in London, England, in 1886 as an alternative venue to the Royal Academy. The NEAC holds an annual exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Mall Galleries ...

and the

Royal Society of Portrait Painters The Royal Society of Portrait Painters is a charity based at Carlton House Terrace, SW1, London that promotes the practice and appreciation of portraiture art. Its Annual Exhibition of portraiture is held at Mall Galleries, and it runs a commi ...

in 2001 and 2003 respectively, becoming the youngest person to be elected to those institutions. In 2007 he won the

Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize is an annual art award, intended to encourage creative representational painting and draughtsmanship. It gives out prizes totalling £25,000. The prize originated in London in 2005, with a collaboration between the W ...

. His work is to be found in numerous public and private collections, including the

National Portrait Gallery, London The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art gallery in London that houses a collection of portraits of historically important and famous British people. When it opened in 1856, it was arguably the first national public gallery in the world th ...

. In 2009 he became artist in residence at

All Souls College All Souls College (official name: The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed, of Oxford) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows (i.e., full me ...

, Oxford, where he undertook a large commission depicting College staff. The resulting work, The All Souls Triptych, was displayed at the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University ...

in 2012 and now sits in one of

Nicholas Hawksmoor Nicholas Hawksmoor ( – 25 March 1736) was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects ...

's twin towers at All Souls College. In 2014 Sullivan was appointed artist in residence at the

Reform Club The Reform Club is a private members' club, owned and controlled by its members, on the south side of Pall Mall, London, Pall Mall in central London, England. As with all of London's original gentlemen's clubs, it had an all-male membership for ...

. . In 2017, Sullivan won first place in the BP Portrait awards for "Breech!", a portrait of his wife breast-feeding their infant daughter.

References

External links

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Benjamin Sullivan on RP website

Benjamin Sullivan on NPG website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sullivan, Benjamin 1977 births Alumni of the Edinburgh College of Art 21st-century English painters English male painters Living people Artists from Grimsby, Lincolnshire 21st-century English male artists