by In the oil paintings that made Jack Vettriano famous and rich, the women are slim and wear evening dresses, the men are carved and in smokes, Don Homburg hats and long coats and kiss the neck of their data. In the world of Vettriano, which died at the age of 73, couples dress up for the beach, drive classic cars, smoke late cigarettes and drink whiskey for meat courage.
The artist defended his nostalgic vision against his many critics: “My paintings are about sex and that is not acceptable for her,” he said. “It would be okay if I painted inner -city problems and urban decay. They don’t like me either because I’m car. I came into the back door and they had no chance of shaping myself. “
The museum company dismissed the work with its circular figuration as a “shopping center art”, but the public flocked to shops to buy it, and Vettriano sold more than a million prints of its most famous painting, The Singing Butler after it was manufactured in 1991. And at some point he earned half a million a year on goods rights for his pictures.
The lovers in the singing Butler are turned away from two domestic employees, the roof that are against the atmospheric sky, a few dancing dancing on a beach in the evening. The original won in 2004 at an £ 744,800 auction.
He was born Jack Hoggan in Methil, Fife, the son of William, a miner and Catherine. He adopted his grandfather’s last name (added an “A” to Vettrino) when he broke through a homage to the man who encouraged him for the first time as an artist at the age of 30 (with empty battles as a canvas), and sometimes because he thought, an Italian name would fit his new profession better.
Jack hated the Kirkcaldy Technical College and went at the age of 15. For a decade, he had a number of everyday jobs, including door-to-door sales in Darlington and the work as a trainee for a few months in London. For his 21st birthday, a friend bought him back in Fife a number of watercolors and told him: “If you don’t do anything with your life, you will live and die in this city”.
In 1979 Vettriano applied for a management position in Bahrain, his first job, but still gave him the time to pursue his up -and -coming painting practice. While he was in the Middle East, he had his first exhibition.
A year later he married Gail Cormack in Scotland and took on a job at the newspaper service company of his father -in -law. But art was now his goal and he studied and copied everything from Renaissance master works to Salvador Dalí. In 1988 he submitted two works by the Royal Scottish Academy, model in a white panties in which Gail was hardly dressed, and on Saturday evening a couple that showed a couple in the ballroom in Kirkcaldy during the night.
Both work sold on the opening evening and received a positive representation of Scotland the next day on Sunday. Due to the success, he applied for the Edinburgh College of Art, but was announced that his portfolio “had not reached the required standard”. The Snub injured him, but he later recorded him to have torn him down.
Now divorced by Gail, he visited brothels and strip -bars as part of his “research” and became a fodder of success as a boulevard feed. “I don’t say that I didn’t enjoy it … I saw how it works and it’s pretty fascinating, but it’s a fascination that is like drugs.”
While women are sexually dressed in his earlier work without exception, but are often dressed and are often shown how they bend into a hug or standing above the male figure, the later work of the artist was darker and obviously erotic. In 2004 Lynn Barber found in an interview with Vettriano for the observer: “There are two Jack Vettrianos; Nice JV, who uses butler and ball gown and evil JV, who works for sex games. And obviously wins bad JV. “
A work in the 2008 series is an uncanny turn of the emotions that a woman bends and removes her underwear in front of a suitable man. A second painting shows another naked woman sitting in a chair while a man hovers behind. Vettriano rejected claims that his work was hostile to women. “Take a look at it again and you will see that it is the women who have power,” he told the Daily Mail.
In 1999 Vettriano, who was fed up with the Vitriol of Scottish critics, moved to London. And then in 2010 to beautiful. “I am involved in worries about my place in the art world. I don’t sit at home in front of my easel and think about where to go on vacation. What I think is what someone said about me five years ago and it still annoys me, ”he said.
The darker topic coincided with the artist’s intermittent drug use. In 2011 he was caught driving over the border and in the possession of a drug in class B, amphetamine, that the police said that he thought it was cocaine. “Cocaine just hit the point,” he said. “It arouses your sexual appetite, but unfortunately you don’t have the power to do something about it.”
In 2013 he received a retrospective in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, which the Scots described as “miserable, soulless show”, and in 2022 there was an exhibition of his earliest work in the Kirkcaldy galleries. Now “Clean As a Whistle” – and two young muses he had met in a café because he had helped him, he was less disturbing with the poor favor of the art company.
“You don’t like an artist who is as popular as I do because he takes part of your authority,” Vettriano told Radio Times in 2015.
He appointed OBE 2003.
• Jack Vettriano (Jack Hoggan), artist, born on November 17, 1951; Dead found on March 1, 2025
