.png)
4 hours ago
1
In the oil paintings that made Jack Vettriano famous and rich, the women are slim and wear evening dress, the men are chiselled and in tuxes, don homburg hats and long coats, and kiss the necks of their dates. In the world of Vettriano, who has died aged 73, couples dress up for the beach, drive classic cars, smoke late night cigarettes and drink whisky for carnal courage.
The artist defended his nostalgic vision against his many critics: “My paintings are about sex and that is not acceptable to them,” he said. “It would be OK if I painted inner-city problems and urban decay. They also don’t like me because I’m self-taught. I came in the back door and they haven’t had a chance to mould me.”
The museum establishment dismissed the work, with its flatly rendered figuration, as “shopping mall art”, but the public flocked to shops to buy it, and Vettriano sold more than a million prints of his most famous painting, The Singing Butler, after it was made in 1991; and at one point he was earning half a million a year in merchandise rights for his pictures.
Featuring a couple dancing in evening wear on a beach, their faces turned away from the viewer, the lovers in The Singing Butler are framed by two domestic staff holding umbrellas against the moody sky. The original fetched £744,800 at auction in 2004.
He was born Jack Hoggan in Methil, Fife, to William, a miner, and Catherine. He adopted his grandfather’s surname (adding an “a” to Vettrino) as he broke through as an artist aged 30, partly in homage to the man who first encouraged him to draw (using blank betting slips as his canvas) and partly because he thought an Italian name would suit his new profession better.
Jack hated Kirkcaldy technical college and left aged 15, heading to the Michael colliery, though he spent most of his time “smoking and skiving”. For a decade he had a series of mundane jobs, including door-to-door sales in Darlington and working as a trainee chef for a few months in London. For his 21st birthday, back in Fife, a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours and told him that “if you don’t do something with your life you’re going to live and die in this town”.
In 1979 Vettriano applied for a management position in Bahrain, his first white-collar job, but one that nonetheless afforded him time to pursue his burgeoning painting practice. While out in the middle east he had his first exhibition.
A year later, back in Scotland, he married Gail Cormack, and took a job at his father-in-law’s newspaper distribution company; but art was now his goal and he studied and copied everything from Renaissance masterpieces to Salvador Dalí. In 1988 he submitted two works to the Royal Scottish Academy, Model in a White Slip, which featured Gail barely dressed, and Saturday Night, depicting a couple whiling the night away at the ballroom in Kirkcaldy.
Both works sold on the opening night and received a positive write-up from Scotland on Sunday the next day. Buoyed by the success he applied to Edinburgh College of Art but was told his portfolio “failed to reach the standard required”. The snub hurt him, but he later credited it with spurring him on.
Now divorced from Gail, he would visit brothels and strip bars as part of his “research”, becoming tabloid fodder as his success snowballed. “I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy it … I’ve seen how it operates and it is quite fascinating, but it’s a fascination that is like drugs.”
Whereas in his earlier work the women invariably are sexily dressed, but clothed, and often are shown leaning into an embrace or standing over the male figure, the artist’s later work was darker, more obviously erotic. In 2004 Lynn Barber noted in an interview with Vettriano for the Observer: “There are two Jack Vettrianos; nice JV who goes in for butlers and ballgowns and nasty JV who goes in for sex games. And, evidently, nasty JV is winning.”
One work in the 2008 series A Sinister Turn of Emotion shows a woman bent over, removing her underwear, in front of a suited man; a second painting shows another naked woman, sitting on a chair, while a man hovers behind. Vettriano rejected claims his work was misogynistic. “Take another look at it and you’ll see it’s the women who have the power,” he told the Daily Mail.
In 1999, fed up with the vitriol of Scottish critics, Vettriano moved to London; and then in 2010 to Nice. “I do get caught up in worries about my place in the art world. I don’t sit at home in front of my easel thinking about where to go on holiday. What I am thinking about is what somebody said about me five years ago and it’s still bugging me,” he said.
The darker subject matter coincided with the artist’s intermittent drug use. In 2011 he was caught driving over the limit and in possession of a class B drug, amphetamine, which Vettriano told police he thought was cocaine. “Cocaine just hit the spot,” he said. “It arouses your sexual appetite, but unfortunately it doesn’t give you the power to do anything about it.”
In 2013 he was given a retrospective at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, which the Scotsman branded “a miserable, soulless show”, and in 2022 an exhibition of his earliest work was held at the Kirkcaldy Galleries. Now “clean as a whistle” – crediting two young female muses he met in a coffee shop for helping him – he became less bothered with the ill favour of the art establishment.
“They don’t like an artist who is as popular as me because it takes away part of their authority,” Vettriano told the Radio Times in 2015. “I have what I want and that is the support of the public and that means far more to me than the approval of a bunch of well-educated art buffs.”
He appointed OBE in 2003.
