Jack Vettriano

Jack Vettriano was born in Fife, Scotland, in 1951. After leaving school at 15, he followed his father into the mines, where he worked as an apprentice engineer. He later held 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 been sold under his surname, Hoggan. He 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 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, he exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London.
He was represented by the Portland Gallery from 1994 to 2007 and, during this time, held numerous sold-out solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, and New York, and counts Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Fergusson, and Sir Tim Rice among his collectors. In 1996, Pavilion Books commissioned W. Gordon Smith to compile an anthology, "Fallen Angels," in which over 40 of Vettriano's images were accompanied by a selection of Scottish writings. Poets, playwrights, novelists, and actors were invited to respond personally to a painting or poem. In the same year, Sir Terrance Conran commissioned Vettriano to paint a series of paintings for Conran's Bluebird Club in London. The seven paintings inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm 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 an exceptional one for Vettriano's career: his best-known painting, "The Singing Butler," sold at Sotheby's for nearly £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, "Jack Vettriano: The People's Painter"; Pavilion published a book entitled "Lovers and Other Strangers," an anthology of his work to date, with text by Anthony Quinn.
In 2008, Vettriano was commissioned to paint 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 documentary broadcast on BBC One in March 2008.
In 2009, Vettriano launched the Heartbreak publishing house and his own gallery, also called Heartbreak. That same year, he was commissioned by the Yacht Club de 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 Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery in Fife. The exhibition then traveled 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 over 100 works and ran until February 23, 2014. It attracted 123,300 visitors, breaking the attendance record of the 1948 Van Gogh exhibition. Vettriano sold his London gallery in 2015 and, later that year, established his own publishing company: Jack Vettriano Publishing. Limited.
In 2017, he was one of three artists commissioned to paint portraits of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. These were subsequently exhibited at the Glasgow People's Palace, while the images were transferred to murals in central Glasgow. This project was the subject of a BBC documentary that first aired on June 14, 2017.