In this, as in each of its 26 years, the BP Portrait Award deserves bittersweet praise for stubbornly championing a dying cause.

A record submission of 1,113 entries has not helped. The 56 works on show incite the same sense of dull mediocrity familiar from previous years.

Save for a few flashes, the wound inflicted long ago by the invention of photography would be confirmed as fatal. Indeed to exhibit some of these works, presented as the best that we can now produce, a mere pebble's throw from examples by Holbein and Titian seems a morbid act of unnecessary cruelty. Not that talent is absent here but the manner of its expenditure is telling.

This year's winner, Andrew Tift, 38, like the last, Dean Marsh, is a competent draughtsman, has an eye for detail and is painstaking in his approach. Kitty, a triptych of small monochromatic painting of Kitty Garman, Lucien Freud's first wife, ably captures the subject listening, about to speak, and finally in posed profile. Evidently skilful, Kitty succeeds in imparting more than a hint of the sitter's nature.