Self-taught Scottish painter Jack Vettriano has died. The artist set a Scottish record when his most famous work, The Singing Butler, was sold at auction in 2004 for £744,800; the painting is also the UK’s best-selling art print, having sold more than a million copies.
Born in 1951 in Methil, Fife, Vettriano left school at the age of fifteen to become a mining engineer. For his twenty-first birthday, he was given a set of watercolour paints and began to dedicate his spare time to painting. It was over a decade later in 1989 that his breakthrough came, when he submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual show; both sold on the first day, and he decided to dedicate himself to working as a full-time artist.
Vettriano was often dismissed by critics. Jonathan Jones, writing for the Guardian in 2005, described his work as ‘toneless, textureless, brainless slick corpses of paintings’, while others called it ‘brainless erotica’ and ‘mere wallpaper’. ‘His paintings aren’t classy, or clever, or conceptual. They’re lurid, chintzy, fusty, old-fashioned, conservative and often pretty sexist,’ critic Eddy Frankel wrote upon the news of the artist’s death; yet, he argued, it is precisely ‘that simplicity, that directness that is totally unburdened by shame or embarrassment is the appeal.’
In a 2013 interview with the Herald, Vettriano stated: ‘There’s a funny thing. Because some people absolutely abhor my work, and there are some people who absolutely love it. I have this terrible fear – I think it’s a working class thing – of having to defend myself at a dinner table.’ He added: ‘I don’t buy into the view that anything popular has anything to do with bad taste or cheapness. If something is popular, it’s popular for a fucking reason.’
The first major retrospective of Vettriano’s work was held in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow in 2013, and became at the time the most successful commercial exhibition ever staged in Glasgow. Celebrities who acquired Vettriano’s paintings included actors Jack Nicholson and Robbie Coltrane, football manager Alex Ferguson and songwriter Tim Rice, while Vettriano designed a charity Christmas card for Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond.
Vettriano once said his paintings had been inspired by ‘25 years of sexual misbehaviour’. In 2013 he said: ‘I went through a period of hedonistic stuff in Edinburgh. I went through these periods … bondage and stuff like that. I don’t regret those periods.’ In recent years Vettriano spoke publicly about his struggles with mental health and his addiction to alcohol and cocaine.
A satirical reimagining by Banksy of The Singing Butler is due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London (from the collection of Blink-182 musician Mark Hoppus) on 4 March 2025, with an estimate of five million pounds.
