Jack Vettriano: A Life
Emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, Jack Vettriano became Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist.
Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of Vettriano's work outsell van Gogh, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world. Vettriano's images are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world; a timeless place where past and present intertwine. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars, clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms.
His powerful canvases are beautifully captured in this edition of Jack Vettriano, which includes works from earlier in his career and more recent images, from exhibitions between 2006 and 2010.
Jack Vettriano was entirely self-taught. A Scotsman of Italian descent, he left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer working down the Fife coalfields. For his twenty-first birthday a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint. His first solo exhibition in Edinburgh was a sell-out and since then he has had solo exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York.
Over the last thirty years, interest in Vettriano’s work has grown consistently. Vettriano’s best known painting, The Singing Butler, was sold at Sotheby’s for close to £750,000. He was awarded an OBE for Services to the Visual Arts. In 2013, a major twenty year Retrospective exhibition of Vettriano's work was staged at Kelvingrove art Gallery and Musuem in Glasgow. He passed away in early 2025.