Self-taught and sneered at by Scotland’s Art
Establishment, Jack Vettriano, the son of a
Fife coal miner, is one of the world’s best-
known and most successful contemporary
painters. Five years ago his enigmatic work,
The Singing Butler, sold for an astonishing
£744,800, the highest price ever paid at
auction for a Scottish painting. Endlessly
reproduced in prints, posters and postcards,
it’s become an icon of popular culture, as
instantly familiar as Van Gogh’s Irises or the
smile of the Mona Lisa. Vettriano’s canvases,
portraying longing, lust and love in a low-
lit, late-night world of bars, clubs, bedrooms
and ballrooms, strike a nostalgic note of self
recognition. So much so, that he has become
known as ‘the People’s Painter’. And yet the
more Vettriano’s popularity soars, the more
determined Scotland’s art establishment
seems to become in excluding his work from
public collections. At his studio in London,
Jack Vettriano spoke with Bruce Stannard.
A
t dawn on what promises to be a
beautifully crisp, clear, spring morning in
London, Jack Vettriano might be forgiven
for contemplating something other than
the 12 to 16 hours of unrelenting hard work that
now lie ahead of him in his Knightsbridge studio.
Having earned the kind of wealth and international
recognition that remains the stuff of dreams for most
painters, one imagines he might now relish the notion
of a little self-indulgence: perhaps a lazy, do-nothing
morning punctuated by brunch in Mayfair and a
stroll through the sybaritic delights of up-market
Harrods, just around the corner. But, no; none of that
holds the slightest interest for him. Jack Vettriano has
travelled far from his humble beginnings in a two-up,
two-down, Coal Board terrace in a miner’s row in the
village of Methilhill, Fife, but the rigorous demands
of his Scottish work ethic have never left him; nor are
they ever likely to.
A creature of ingrained habit, he rises each day
in the pre-dawn darkness, lights the first in a chain
Jillian Edelstein
of cigarettes, brews strong black coffee and, by five
o’clock, while the melancholy music of Leonard
Cohen, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell filters through
the hi-fi, he sits down to work on the primed linen
canvas locked on his paint-spattered easel. He will
stay here throughout the day and much of the night,
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