03-03-2025
Jack Vettriano, self-taught artist who was derided by the critics but had huge commercial success
Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was a self-taught Scottish painter who was treated with contempt by the art establishment but became one of the most commercially successful artists of his generation.
A late starter who did not sell a painting until he was 38, Vettriano established a signature style that, though reminiscent of Edward Hopper, was indisputably his own. His work paid little heed to temporal or topographical concerns; rather, he inhabited the landscape of his imagination, a mysterious, nostalgic, exotic world peopled by elegant ladies and predatory men located on windswept beaches and esplanades, or in bars, bedrooms and dance halls.
His paintings had a strong narrative content and were suffused with glamour, but there was also melancholy, and the cold, seedy eroticism of fetishism and loveless passion. Vettriano's obsession was women, and his interest lay in their relationships with men.
But many critics objected that there were no relationships in his paintings, simply people existing in space, their togetherness no more than an artistic trope, an empty narrative devoid of significance. Some went further: one described his work as 'slick pornography', while another, alluding to the imperfections of his autodidactic technique, accused him of 'just colouring in'. His supporters claimed that such criticism was fuelled by jealousy and artistic snobbery, and there could be little doubt that the artist embodied the divide between high and low culture.
Vettriano's life and work were inextricable. While emphasising his reclusive nature, the artist was happy to tell interviewers about his inability to maintain relationships, his visits to brothels, his casual sex. These were at the core of his art and its voyeuristic nature.
But if his art divided the critics, no one could dispute its popularity. His most famous painting, the enigmatic The Singing Butler (1991), which depicted a couple dancing on a beach with a butler and maid in attendance, was sold by Sotheby's in 2004 for £744,800. The artist's income from posters, mugs, umbrellas, T-shirts, mobile phone skins and place mats adorned with the image was reportedly more than £250,000 a year.
For good measure, another beach scene, Mad Dogs, was one of the most popular posters of the age. But when critics set his commercial success against his perceived technical, aesthetic and artistic shortcomings, Vettriano's art raised eternal questions about the relationship between art and commerce.
He was born Jack Hoggan in St Andrews, Fife, on November 17 1951. His father, William, was a miner 'who used to say that whenever one of us was born they put another cup of water in the soup' and who provided his early drawing materials – betting slips and wooden pencils – from the bookmakers. His mother was Charlotte.
He was educated at Kirkcaldy Technical College but left aged 14 to become a miner. He lasted two years, 'smoking, skiving and thinking about women', before working as an apprentice mechanical engineer, magazine-subscription salesman, trainee chef, barman and personnel officer.
He fuelled his imagination on the beaches and in the ballrooms of Fife. A girlfriend inspired him by giving him a set of paints for his 21st birthday and telling him: 'If you don't do something you're going to live and die in this town.' He became obsessed by painting, and despite being turned down by Edinburgh School of Art taught himself by painting rotting fruit and copying the great artists.
In 1979 he moved to Bahrain to work as a management consultant, attracted by its tax-free status and lack of distractions, and exhibited locally. Returning to Scotland the following year, he married Gail Cormack and began working for his father-in-law's newspaper distribution business. The couple also invested in property, buying, redecorating and selling, revealing the financial acuity that would characterise his artistic career.
In the mid-1980s he moved to Edinburgh to pursue art full-time, which he did with a ruthlessness that destroyed his marriage. Developing a style loosely based on film noir, he completed each work in a single session, often working through the night.
To distance himself from the copied works he had sold, Hoggan changed his name to Vettriano – taken from his maternal grandfather, Peter Vettrino, with an 'a' added 'for effect' – and exhibited Model in a White Slip, a portrait of his ex-wife, and Saturday Night, a couple in a dance hall, at the Royal Scottish Academy's 1988 summer exhibition. Both sold immediately, and the fledgling painter found a champion in the art critic for Scotland on Sunday, W Gordon Smith.
Over the next three years Vettriano built a following, attracting little critical enthusiasm but steady buyers for his romantic, allusive scenes of elegantly dressed gentlemen of uncertain intent engaged with exotic or scantily clad women. If his technique occasionally betrayed his lack of formal education, there was, from the first, evidence of a singular vision.
But if his influences ranged from the sparse settings, ennui and open narrative of Hopper to the brasserie nostalgia of the young Scottish painter Stephen Conroy, Vettriano displayed an obsession with the alienation of casual sex that was entirely his own. And while his subject matter and style were unchanging, his technique gradually improved.
He looked back on The Singing Butler and concluded that although it had 'a certain charm', he believed that if he painted it again 'it would be better '. But with its evocation of a lost, more genteel world, the painting attained an iconic status that superseded its technical immaturity.
In 1993 Vettriano joined the Portland Gallery, attracted by the dealer Tom Hewlett's assertion that his best work should be selling 'for £10,000 not £4,000'. Very soon it was, but still the critics sniffed. Hewlett believed that that was because 'if you have a painting that the ordinary man can understand, it rather puts the critic out of a job.' The academic Duncan MacMillan countered: 'He's welcome to paint as long as no one takes him seriously.'
Vettriano considered MacMillan and his ilk to be 'breathtakingly arrogant', and said: 'They're trying to kill my spirit. That's not on.' But he was a skilful manipulator of the media whom it suited to play the underdog. He attracted vast coverage as interviewers probed the links between his solitary, nocturnal foraging and the whiff of sexual intent depicted in works such as Back Where You Belong Jack, Suddenly One Summer and The Big Tease – or, more overtly, Wicked Games and Passion Overflow.
The artist, who described his work as 'strictly for voyeurs', knew his market. He kept a cupboard full of stilettos in his studio, always painted his models in stockings and suspenders rather than tights and often included a third party, sometimes himself, removed from the action, quietly observing.
Through the 1990s his work developed a darker hue. The sense of the erotic was more overt and a whiff of danger or cruelty replaced the elusive romanticism and jilted disappointment of earlier works such as Dance Me to the End of Love or Table For One, and he painted no beach scenes after 1996.
But beyond its undoubted sexiness and escapism, there remained an identifiable atmosphere in Vettriano's work. His work had a stylistic unity that shifted easily between his favoured locations, and the stagey eroticism of strangers' rooms even pervaded the sunlit beach.
The whiff of danger was not always confined to his work. In 1999 a Scottish tabloid claimed that the artist had stalked a woman, with whom he admitted brief contact. When The Spectator repeated the story Vettriano threatened to sue, and the allegations were retracted.
It was for such reasons – and not, he maintained, to avoid the Scottish art establishment – that he left Edinburgh for the 'anonymity' of London. In his Knightsbridge house he continued to paint obsessively, never straying from the knowledge that 'the only thing that really interests me is women. And also a sort of melancholic, rose-coloured look at the past.' He also had an apartment in Nice, where he died.
Despite his self-proclaimed 'outsider' status, Vettriano was appointed OBE in 2003 and was the subject of a hagiographical South Bank Show, as well as monographs and a biography. When he exhibited in New York in 2002, although he attracted scant press interest, buyers flew over from Britain and demand was so great that the event had to be ticketed. In 2008 he painted a portrait of Zara Phillips for Sport Relief.
In 2012 he was convicted of drink-driving and amphetamine possession. That year, The Singing Butler went on display at the Aberdeen Art Gallery as part of an exhibition entitled From Van Gogh to Vettriano. The following year, Jack Vettriano: A Retrospective, opened at the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow.
In 2017, Vettriano was one of three artists commissioned to paint portraits of Billy Connolly to celebrate the comedian's 75th birthday. The images were transferred to murals in the centre of Glasgow; Vettriano's is in Dixon Street.
Jack Vettriano married Gail Cormack, who had a daughter, in 1980; they later separated.
Jack Vettriano, born November 17 1951, death announced March 3 2025
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