March 2026

Marking its 170th anniversary, the Society of Women Artists has announced that Sally Ward’s portrait of The Rt Hon. Rachel Reeves will be acquired into the Parliamentary Art Collection . Following an extensive open call to the SWA membership, Sally’s winning work was unveiled at a special event in Parliament this March attended by Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP and Caroline Nokes MP (Chair of the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art) to mark this landmark collaboration. More information can be found here. This initiative celebrates the remarkable longevity of the Society of Women Artists through a reflection on the great strides women have made in Parliamentary history during the lifetime of the society.  The collection is of historic and national significance, documenting the history of Parliament over the past 150 years. 

Sally’s painting, The Rt. Hon. Rachel Reeves, the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, preparing to deliver her first Budget, captures the UK’s first female Chancellor (after 800 years of male predecessors) in the moments before delivering her first Budget in 2024. The work is intended to be a contemporary history painting as much as a portrait, capturing a defining moment for women’s equality in British political history. The work aims to reflect both the weight of historic lineage and captures a significant first for women’s leadership and representation in UK politics. 

The Chancellor is shown rehearsing with advisers, the Budget speech laid out before her, marking the immediacy of the task ahead; the iconic red Budget box is behind her, symbolic of a historic lineage which extends back to Gladstone (the first to use the red briefcase in the 1850s), and; an imagined chequered motif on the cushion which is a playful nod to the Chancellor’s private passion for chess, but also alludes to the historic origins of the word Exchequer – derived from the chequered cloth on which accounts were written for the first Exchequer Budget in 1248. The work was been painted with the kind permission of the Chancellor and was based on reference photographs by Simon Dawson also with his permission.

The painting will hang in the contemporary collection at Portcullis House, and will be on loan for a short period to the Mall Galleries during The Society of Women Artists’ annual exhibition this year from 24th-28th June.

For press enquiries or for further information please contact Ruth O’Sullivan waysofcreating@gmail.com