In less than ten years, Jack Vettriano has emerged from obscurity to become Britain’s foremost contemporary narrative painter despite never having received any formal training at an art school.
Born in St Andrews, Scotland in 1954, Vettriano dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to become a mining engineer in the local mining basins. For his twenty-first birthday, a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolors, and from then on, he spent much of his free time learning to paint on his own. The local art gallery, the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery and Museum, with its famous collection of Scottish paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, was particularly inspiring. Fourteen years passed before Vettriano felt ready to show his work in public. In 1989 he offered two works to the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy; both were accepted and sold on the first day. The following year, an equally enthusiastic reaction was received by the three paintings, which entered for the prestigious Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. In the past nine years, interest and desire for her work has grown rapidly. There have been sold-out solo shows in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. In November 1999, Vettriano’s work was shown for the first time in New York, when twenty paintings were exhibited at the 20th Century International Art Fair at The Armory. Fifty UK collectors flew in for the Fair’s opening night and all twenty paintings were sold out an hour after the opening. In March 2000, BBC Scotland produced a half-hour documentary on Vettriano for its Arts Series EX-S; It initially aired in Scotland only, but the documentary is likely to air across the UK later this year. Vettriano’s last major exhibition, Lovers and Other Strangers, took place at the Portland Gallery in London in June 2000. After its presentation in London, the exhibition was transferred on loan to the Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery in Fife. Attendance figures indicated that more people visited the Museum during the Vettriano exhibition than in the entire previous year. Coinciding with this exhibition, a book about the artist was published.
The Singing Butler is Jack Vettriano’s best-selling print. Vettriano has made millions with this one image. Its art deco style captures the imagination of the public. Published by Pavilion Books, Lovers and Other Strangers features more than 100 paintings selected from the work of the last ten years and biographical text of Anthony Quinn. In 2010, Jack Vettriano’s new exhibition, Days of Wine and Roses, started in Kirkcaldy before moving to London and Milan. Jack Vettriano Gifts In September 2001, Vettriano donated a painting to a charity auction, held at Sotheby’s to help Help the Hospices. .
Night in the City is one of the artist’s sexy images, still available as a limited edition print. The painting, Beautiful Dreamer, was Lot’s second-highest bid, winning £ 25,000. The Portland Gallery in the UK exhibited twenty-one paintings at artLONDON, an annual contemporary art fair, in May 2002. All twenty-one paintings were sold during the first hour of opening night. Apart from his exhibitions, Vettriano has gained a large following through the posters and prints of his paintings that are distributed throughout the world. This year, the two best-selling art posters in Britain are images of Vettriano.
Dance me to the End of Love and Dancer in Emerald are 2 of Vettriano’s best-selling posters at the moment. To date, more than 1,000,000 posters of Vettriano paintings have been sold worldwide. A University spokesperson said: “It is a privilege for the University to honor one of Scotland’s most important contemporary artists and a particular pleasure to do so because of the amount of time that Jack Vettriano has invested in helping University students to fulfill some of his own artistic aspirations. “
Vettriano’s most recent work is the limited edition Diva print, published in June 2020. Diva has the artist’s typical romantic flair, with a lady putting on makeup to get ready for a night out.