Painter who was loved by the public and detested by critics
Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was a self-taught painter whose work proved hugely popular with the public, said The Telegraph. In a style that was influenced by Edward Hopper but very much his own, he depicted a strange world peopled by predatory men and elegantly dressed women who met on windswept beaches, and in bars, bedrooms and dance halls. Bathed in 1940s nostalgia, his paintings were "suffused with glamour" but also unsettling, conveying fetishes and loveless passion, sometimes with a degree of menace. They sold for up to £200,000 new, and at one point he was making £500,000 a year by licensing them for use on posters, greetings cards and jigsaw puzzles. But the critics tended to be unified in their contempt for his work, finding it derivative, kitsch and flat, and it seemed the more successful he became, the more they hated it.
You could wonder if Vettriano had personally offended them, said Alexander Larman in The Spectator. One critic said he was "not even an artist", just peddling a "crass male fantasy"; another accused him of "colouring in". The director of the National Gallery of Scotland sniffed that Vettriano's work was "indifferent" and "low down on our list of priorities". And indeed it would be a stretch to describe it as "great art"; but nor did Vettriano claim it to be. What seemed unnecessary was the intensity of the criticism. "I'm not in the same league as Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon," he once said. "I know my place, and it isn't up there. But I am popular, and it grieves me that some people associate popularity with trash. It's a terribly snobbish view."
He was born Jack Hoggan in 1951, and grew up in the mining area of Leven, in Fife. Money was tight, but he described his childhood as "great fun", said The Times. He collected birds' eggs, snuck into the football ground to watch the local team, and sang songs in the pubs for packets of sweets. He had no thought of becoming an artist then, though he enjoyed drawing on the back of betting slips. By the age of 10, his father was sending him to work picking potatoes and cleaning windows. He left school at 15, and at 16 he started an apprenticeship at the colliery. A high point of his teenage years was visiting Kirkcaldy's ballrooms and seeing young women all dressed up – "the mascara, the blue eyeshadow, the bright red lipstick, the white stilettos".
When he was 21, his then girlfriend, a teacher, changed his life. She warned him that if he didn't act fast, he would "live and die in this town". She encouraged him to go to college, which qualified him for white-collar work, and gave him a set of watercolours, which he used to teach himself to paint, copying from photos, other artists, and even an artists' reference manual. In the 1970s, he got a job in Bahrain, which is where he held his first exhibition, in 1979. Returning to Scotland, he was turned down for a place at art school, but in 1988 he had two pieces accepted for the Scottish Academy's annual show. Both sold on the first day, leading to more exhibitions. Around this time, he changed his name to Vettriano, his mother's maiden name. Then in 1993, he was taken on by Tom Hewlett of the Portland Gallery in London.
"What first attracted me to Jack's work was the same as what attracts everybody to it," he said. "There's a narrative which invites you to continue the story… They're like a moment caught in time and you continue the story in your head."
A melancholic man who suffered from depression, Vettriano admitted to being obsessed by sex, and had visited brothels – experiences reflected in some of his paintings. But the public favoured his more romantic scenes. "The Singing Butler" – a couple ballroom dancing on a beach while being sheltered from the rain by a maid and a butler – was arguably his most famous work. It sold for nearly £750,000 at auction in 2004. A few days after Vettriano's death, a 2005 Banksy based on it sold for £4.3 million.
