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The Kingston Prize is a national biennial competition for portraiture and figurative painting based on real life. “The aim,” Jason Donville, a co-chair of the competition, explains in the preface to this hefty, handsome, and full-colour bilingual coffee-table book, “is to encourage and reward the creation of contemporary portraits by Canadian artists, to promote Canadian artists through competition, and, over time, to develop a historical record of Canadians, by Canadians.” Founded in 2005 by Kaaren and Julian Brown — who in 1962 settled in Kingston, Ontario, where they later raised their family — the contest is intended to generate a “visual history of national life, recording people of prominence, work and leisure activities, clothing and hairstyles, and, on the other side of the easel, the painting or drawing styles of the artists active in portraiture.”

But is anything in art as simple and clear-cut as that suggests? Thankfully, this competition does not pretend...