The BP Portrait Award was given 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 in London.

Wim Heldens (1954, Sittard, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam. He paints in a hyperrealist style. His work is more known in the U.S.A and the United Kingdom than in his home country.

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 National Portrait Gallery'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".