Jack Vettriano - The Artist
Born in Scotland in 1951, Jack Vettriano left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer in the local coalfields. For his twenty-first birthday a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and, from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint. The local, Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, with its renowned collection of 19th and 20th century Scottish paintings, was inspirational.
The local, Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, with its renowned collection of 19th and 20th century Scottish paintings, was inspirational. It was fourteen years before Vettriano felt ready to show any of his work in public. In 1989 he offered two works to the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition; both were accepted and sold on the first day. The following year, an equally enthusiastic reaction greeted the three paintings, which he entered for the prestigious Summer Exhibition at London's Royal Academy.
Although his work is generally dismissed by art critics as being vulgar and devoid of imagination, Jack Vettriano is one of the most commercially successful living artists. His original paintings now regularly fetch six figure prices, but he is thought to make more money from the sale of reproductions. According to The Guardian, he earns 500,000 pounds a year in print royalties. Each year a new set of limited edition prints are published, and his most popular work, The Singing Butler, sells more posters and postcards than any other painting in the UK.
