Jack Vettriano, the immensely well-liked self-taught Neo-Realist artist, who by his personal account painted to supply his viewers escapism along with his nostalgia-fuelled, romantic works, has died aged 73. He was discovered useless at his dwelling in Good, France, on 1 March.
Vettriano was an artwork market phenomenon, producing big gross sales by means of poster reproductions of his work from the Nineties onwards and setting an public sale report for any Scottish artist in 2004 with the sale of his portray The Singing Butler (1992).
To critics targeted on high-end modern artwork, Vettriano remained resolutely “unchic”. For Jonathan Jones, writing in The Artwork Newspaper in 2014, Vettriano existed, just like the guerrilla muralist Banksy (who referenced Vettriano in his personal work), “outdoors the charmed circle” of high-art criticism, in firm with “Lucian Freud and David Hockney, the newspaper cartoonists Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell … portrait painters like Jonathan Yeo, ‘outsider’ artists and artists from the non-Western world who don’t embrace the worldwide modern fashion”. In his Portrait of the artist as a younger lady (2006), the artist Grayson Perry had raised vital hackles by writing: “Subsequent 12 months I believe the judges [of the Turner Prize] ought to nominate Jack Vettriano.”
Talking on a BBC documentary in 2013, Vettriano mentioned how wounded he had been when one critic accused him of “portray by numbers”. It was an angle that he discovered “breathtaking”. “That’s not criticism,” he mentioned, “it’s virtually violence.”
An artwork honest ‘feeding frenzy’
In June 2002, Georgina Adam of The Artwork Newspaper witnessed a “feeding frenzy” on the Artwork London honest across the stand of the Portland Gallery, Vettriano’s representatives. “The queue to purchase his canvases began at 9am for the 6.30pm opening of the honest,” Adam wrote. “By the afternoon the … Portland Gallery, was handing out numbered tickets, and because the opening night bought underway it was unimaginable even to get on to the stand. Fifty individuals wished the 21 work on view; 20 offered that evening at costs between £9,500 and £25,000, with the final one offered the next day.”
Two years later, in April 2004, Vettriano’s The Singing Butler was knocked down at Sotheby’s at Hopetoun Home, for £744,800, towards a £200,000 estimate, then a report for the work of any Scottish artist offered at public sale. The portray—wherein a pair in night costume dance on an idealised seashore watched over by a maid and the titular butler, every of them brandishing umbrellas towards the climate—had been offered to the 2004 vendor for £1,800 at a 1992 exhibition, God’s Kids, which included different Vettriano style scenes set on breeze-swept seashores. The artist’s earlier report at public sale, £98,000, had been set in December 2003.
Different Vettriano works—there have been 14 within the 2004 public sale—”had been additionally exhausting fought for by tons of of bidders who had queued to get into the saleroom”, The Artwork Newspaper reported. “The Vettrianos accounted for nearly £2m of the sale’s £3.3m complete, and went for twice, 3 times and even ten instances estimate. Just one portray not by Vettriano was within the checklist of prime 10 costs.” Within the month earlier than the Sotheby’s sale, Melvyn Bragg had profiled the artist on the long-running ITV arts programme The South Financial institution Present, in Jack Vettriano: the individuals’s painter.
Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler (1992) on present at Hopetoun Home in 2004 earlier than the Sotheby’s public sale the place it offered for a world report sum for any portray by a Scottish artist PA Pictures / Alamy Inventory Photograph
The Singing Butler is the epitome of the Forties film-noir-nostalgic fashion established by Vettriano inside years of his first efficiently submitting work to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1988. Characters, typically scantily clad, typically in formal apparel, are present in half-lit, dream-like, close-framed style scenes, or posed on sunny, idealised, Sorolla-like seashores. His topic, he mentioned in 2013, was love and courtship. His record-setting portray was reimagined by Banksy in Crude Oil (Vettriano) (2005), which fits on sale at Sotheby’s London on 4 March, with an estimate of between £3m and £5m.
Talking on a 2013 BBC documentary, Vettriano talked about his flip from portray inside scenes to seashores, and of the avowedly escapist nature of his portray, which he mentioned was designed to neglect the harshness of his teenage years working down a Fifeshire coalmine (as his father and grandfather had carried out earlier than him). “The place do individuals fall in love?” Vettriano mentioned, “Seashores.” “Maybe,” he mentioned of The Singing Butler, “it offers you some hope. It’s a fantasy. For those who’re residing in Grimsby on a moist Tuesday afternoon, you may be carried away with it.”
Market’s ‘urge for food for the glamorous’ revealed
In a Could 2004 editorial, wanting again on the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, The Artwork Newspaper remarked: “Philosophers and writers corresponding to Elaine Scarry and Denis Donoghue have lately gone public in singing magnificence’s rediscovered charms, and it’s no accident, regardless of the high-minded might imagine, that the market triumph of Jack Vettriano’s work displays an urge for food for the glamorous. The times of the ugly, the mad, the unhappy and the brutal are numbered.”
To Elspeth Moncrieff, writing in regards to the “Vettriano impact” in The Artwork Newspaper the earlier 12 months, Jack Vettriano was, just like the Somerset-based Paul Roberts, one in all a number of Realists “who can deal with paint fantastically and are at present a lot in vogue”. Galleries who represented Realist artists, Moncrieff reported, see “a business swing in the direction of figurative portray for the time being as individuals search one thing tangible and reassuring in robust instances”.
A minimum of I attempted. A minimum of I’m ready to place it up on the wall. And you’ll have a go at it in the event you like
Jack Vettriano
The success of the 2004 public sale raised questions round why the Neo-Realist Vettriano—a business success however critically ignored if not brazenly disdained—was represented in no public assortment within the UK.
Talking on a BBC documentary in 2013, Vettriano mentioned he would like to obtain recognition from the Scottish Nationwide Galleries or from the Tate. His self-portrait The Weight had gone on long-term show within the Scottish Nationwide Portrait Gallery in 2011. In 2013 he was the topic of a retrospective—with a list introduction by the novelist A.L. Kennedy—of greater than 100 examples of his work at Kelvingrove Artwork Gallery in Glasgow. A few of this best-known works featured within the present—together with The Singing Butler, The Billy Boys (1994), Bluebird at Bonneville (1996) and Dance me to the top of Love (1998)—which set a brand new attendance report for the gallery.
A son of the Fifeshire coalmines
He was born Jack Hoggan in Methil, Fifeshire, in 1951, later adopting his mom’s maiden identify when he began to focus on artwork. At 16 he adopted his father and grandfather into work within the native coalmine. As a boy he would draw on paper betting slips introduced dwelling by his Italian grandfather. When he was 21 he was given watercolours by a girlfriend. As an novice, self-trained artist, he informed the BBC in 2017, he needed to develop a method that “offers a fast end result”. So he copied the masters. “You identify them and I’ve copied them: Monet, Degas, Caravaggio. Put all of them in a pot and stir it.”
Talking in 2013, he mentioned he by no means attended artwork lessons for lengthy, as he most well-liked to work alone, with out anybody round him. He most well-liked to work from pictures of his fashions, in order that they may go away. “I felt a bit fraudulent about working from pictures,” he mentioned, however reckoned that many artists did the identical. In a nod to the affect of cinema on his work he mentioned: “I’m like a director however you get one shot. It’s purely escapism. It takes you elsewhere.”
His high-profile collectors included the actors Jack Nicholson and Robbie Coltrane, the soccer supervisor Alex Ferguson, the librettist Tim Rice and the design guru Terence Conran (who commissioned Vettriano to color murals for his Bluebird restaurant in King’s Highway, Chelsea). At a 2008 London Artwork Truthful fundraiser for the Terrence HIggins Belief, Vettriano’s Examine for ‘Bluebird at Bonneville’ (1996), given by the artist, offered for £32,000, almost half of the £80,000 raised for the charity to mark its twenty fifth anniversary.
In a 2006 The Artwork Newspaper survey of artwork college students, questioned on their inventive influences, Marcel Duchamp completed first, and Vettriano completed tied for twenty eighth, in firm with Michelangelo, El Greco, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Michelangelo and Grayson Perry. In 2017 he was one in all three Scottish artists, in firm with John Byrne and Rachel Maclean, to be commissioned to color a portrait to rejoice the comic Billy Connolly’s seventy fifth birthday. The problem there, he mentioned on tv on the time, was how anxious he was that the sitter would love the completed end result.
Talking about his work in 2013, Vettriano mentioned: “The very last thing I’m is leading edge. I like to look at love and faith.” He additionally mirrored on his love of craft, in any line of labor. And he hoped that individuals would realise that: “A minimum of I attempted. A minimum of I’m ready to place it up on the wall. And you’ll have a go at it in the event you like.”
Jack Hoggan (Jack Vettriano), born Methil, Fife 17 November 1951; OBE 2003; married 1980 Gail McCormack (marriage dissolved 1988); died Good, France 1 March 2025.
