Jack Vettriano

Jack Vettriano was born in Fife, Scotland, in 1951. After leaving school at 15, he followed his father to the mine, where he worked as an apprentice engineer. He later worked in white-collar jobs in management services.
Vettriano took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s, when a friend gave him a set of watercolors for his birthday, and from then on he spent much of his free time learning to paint. He learned his craft by copying the Old Masters, the Impressionists, the Surrealists and a plethora of Scottish artists.
Before moving from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, he decided to break with his previous work, which had until then been sold under his surname, Hoggan. He then adopted his mother's maiden name. The turning point came in 1988 when he submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy's annual exhibition; both were sold on the first day and Vettriano was approached by several galleries. He held his first solo exhibition at the Edinburgh gallery in 1992, entitled "Tales of Love and Other Stories", and later that year exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London.
He was represented by the Portland Gallery from 1994 to 2007 and during this time he had numerous sold-out solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong and New York and included Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Fergusson and Sir Tim Rice among its collectors. In 1996, Pavilion Books commissioned W. Gordon Smith to compile an anthology, "Fallen Angels," in which more than 40 Vettriano images are accompanied by a selection of Scottish writings. Poets, playwrights, novelists and actors were invited to personally respond to a painting or poem. The same year, Sir Terrance Conran commissioned a series of paintings from Vettriano for Conran's Bluebird Club in London The seven paintings inspired by the life of Sir Malcom Campbell hung there for ten years.
In 1998, Vettriano moved to London where he continued to present sold-out exhibitions including "Between Darkness and Dawn", "Lovers and Other Strangers" and "Affairs of the Heart".
The year 2004 was exceptional for Vettriano's career: his best-known painting, "The Singing Butler", was sold at Sotheby's for almost £750,000; he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the visual arts and was the subject of a documentary on the Southbank Show, entitled "Jack Vettriano: The People's Painter"; Pavilion has published a book called "Lovers and Other Strangers", an anthology of his work to date, with text by Anthony Quinn.
In 2008, Vettriano was commissioned to paint the portraits of Sir Jackie Stewart and Zara Phillips, the latter part of a charity fundraising project for Sport Relief, the experience of which was captured in a BBC documentary One in March 2008.
In 2009, Vettriano launched the Heartbreak publishing house and his own gallery, also called Heartbreak. The same year he was commissioned by the Yacht Club of Monaco to create a series of paintings to mark the centenary of their famous yacht Tuiga. The exhibition “A Hommage a Tuiga" was presented for the first time in Monaco as part of Classic Yacht Week.
In 2010, an exhibition of over 40 new paintings, 'Days of Wine and Roses', opened at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, County Fife. The exhibition then moved to London, where it opened at Heartbreak in September 2010.
In September 2013, a major exhibition, "Jack Vettriano: A Retrospective" opened at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. It featured more than 100 works and continued until February 23, 2014. It attracted 123,300 visitors and broke the attendance record for the 1948 Van Gogh exhibition. Vettriano sold his gallery in London in 2015 and , later in the year, created his own publishing house: Jack Vettriano Publishing. Limited.
In 2017 he was one of three artists commissioned to paint portraits of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. These were then exhibited at the Glasgow People's Palace, while the images were transferred to murals in the center of Glasgow. This project was the subject of a BBC documentary broadcast for the first time on June 14, 2017.