Landscape Artist of the year 2025 at The Courtauld

This year marks the tenth series of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year, one of its flagship television programmes. The Courtauld has partnered with Sky Arts on the competition and presents the work of the winning artist, in the heart of its great collection of Impressionist landscape paintings.

Around 2,000 artists apply for the competition each year. The judges – art historian and broadcaster Kate Bryan, curator Kathleen Soriano and artist Tai Shan Schierenberg – select 48 to participate in the filmed heats. Each week, a group is taken to a remarkable location and given four hours to create their work. This year, the show travelled to Snowdonia, Bristol, Hampton Court and London’s St Pancras Basin. Three artists competed in the final, which was held at Stonehenge.

The winning artist of the 2025 competition is Benjamin MacGregor, a self-taught painter who works in London. His prize was a commission to travel to the south of France in the footsteps of three great artists in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. His brief was to create a landscape painting based on his experience of this trip. MacGregor was especially captivated by Cézanne and spent time painting the landscape around the artist’s studio in Aix-en-Provence.   

This led him to create the painting In the Shadow of Sainte-Victoire, which he produced back in London. It is a partly observed, partly imagined view from Cézanne’s studio looking out over the landscape that reaches to the Sainte-Victoire mountain range, which the Frenchman painted throughout his life. In the foreground is a plaster statue owned by Cézanne. 

The figure appears in one of his most famous still-life compositions in The Courtauld’s collection. MacGregor’s inclusion of the sculpture against the landscape, framed by the studio window, draws us into an evocative world of art that feels both natural and staged.

The artist described his experience of making the work:

“When I got to Aix-en-Provence, and experienced the mountain first-hand, I found the weight of art history and the magnitude of the task ahead truly overwhelming. I decided to make the painting about this crisis. My approach was to blend the ‘traditional’ view with my own surrealist and fantastical aesthetic. I included features of two other Cézanne paintings I admire, and tried to acknowledge the degree to which the performative part of this commission had obsessed me.”