Jack Vettriano OBE born Jack Hoggan (born 17 November 1951), is a Scottish painter. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, became a best selling image in Britain.
Early life
Jack Vettriano grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, Fife. He grew up in poverty with his mother and father and older brother, in a spartan miner’s cottage, sharing a bed with his brother and wearing handed down clothes. From the age of 10, his father sent him out delivering papers and milk, cleaning windows, picking potatoes and any job that would earn money. His father took half his earnings.
Vettriano left school at 16 and later became an apprentice mining engineer. For a short time in the late 1960s he once had a summer job as a bingo caller at the Beachcomber Amusements on Leven Promenade. Vettriano took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s, when a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours for his 21st birthday. His earliest paintings, under his birth name "Jack Hoggan", were copies or pastiches of impressionist paintings; his first painting was a copy of Monet’s Poppy Fields. Much of his influence came from studying paintings at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery. In 1984, Vettriano first submitted his work to the Shell-sponsored art exhibition in the museum.
In 1987, at 36, Vettriano’s wife Gail left him. He left his job in educational research, and moved to Edinburgh. There, he adopted his mother’s maiden name, gave away his suits to a neighbour and started dressing as an Edwardian dandy. He applied to study Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, but his portfolio was rejected.
Career
In 1988, Vettriano submitted two canvases for the Royal Scottish Academy annual show. Both paintings sold on the first day and Vettriano was approached by several galleries who wanted to sell his work. Further successful exhibitions followed in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York.
His easel paintings cost between £48,000 and £195,000 new. According to The Guardian, he earns £500,000 a year in print royalties. Vettriano’s 1992 painting, The Singing Butler has been the best selling image in Britain. On 21 April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500. It had been rejected in 1992 by the Royal Academy summer exhibition.
In November 1999, Vettriano’s work was shown for the first time in New York, when 21 paintings were displayed at The International 20th Century Arts Fair at The Armory. More than forty collectors from the UK flew out for the event and all twenty-one paintings were sold on the opening night.
In 1996, Sir Terence Conran commissioned Vettriano to create a series of paintings for his new Bluebird Club in London. The seven paintings inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm Campbell hung in the Club for ten years. Heartbreak Publishing, Vettriano’s own publishing company, produced a boxed set featuring signed, limited edition prints of all seven paintings to mark the 75th anniversary of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s final World Land Speed Record. The Bluebird paintings were put up for sale at Sotheby’s on 30 August 2007 and made more than £1m. The most expensive was Bluebird at Bonneville, bought for £468,000 at a Sotheby’s auction held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire.
Vettriano has studios in Scotland and London. He was represented by the Portland Gallery, London from 1993 to 2007 and counts Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Tim Rice and Robbie Coltrane amongst his collectors. To date, five books have been published about Jack Vettriano, the most recent of which is entitled ‘Studio Life’ and was published in March 2008.
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