Jack Vettriano, O.B.E. b.1951

London, Portland Gallery;
Private collection

‘All roads lead back to where I grew up. More and more, I realise that the gunpowder trials were laid long ago when I was a lad. They lie dormant and are then ignited by something more random; perhaps a song on the radio or a conversation in a pub, or seeing a woman done up to the nines ready for a night out’ (Jack Vettriano, quoted in The Daily Express

20 April 2004, p. 42)

Jack Vettriano was born Jack Hoggan in Methil in Fife in 1951, the son of a Scottish father and Italian mother, whose maiden name the artist later adopted. He left school aged sixteen and worked first as a mining engineer in the Fife coal-fields like his father, and later as a trainee chef and a barman and it was not until 1989 that he devoted his time to painting, aged 38. The story of Vettriano’s introduction to painting is tinged with the romance, which pervades his work. He taught himself to paint by copying pictures by the Old Masters and Impressionist pictures in a bed-sit in Fife after a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolour paints for his twenty-first birthday.

Vettriano’s first great success was in 1989 when the Royal Scottish Academy accepted two pictures for the annual exhibition in Edinburgh which sold on the first day. He has held highly successful solo exhibitions across the world; in London , Johannesburg, New York, Hong Kong and in Edinburgh. He was awarded an OBE this year at Buckingham Palace. Prints, posters and greetings cards of his paintings outsell any other artist and he has become the most well loved of modern Scottish artists.