Jack Vettriano, a self-taught Scottish painter best known for “The Singing Butler,” who overcame critical derision to become one of the best selling painters in Europe, has died. He was 73.
His death was announced in a statement on his website, which did not cite a cause or say when or where he died.
Mr. Vettriano, a Neorealist painter with a penchant for eroticism, often depicted ordinary people, particularly glamorous women, in intimate situations with Scotland as the backdrop. Fans of his work included the actor Jack Nicholson and the songwriter Tim Rice, but critics savaged his work as lowbrow and, at times, chauvinistic.
‘The Singing Butler’ initially sold for a fraction of its ultimate value.
“The Singing Butler” was one of the first paintings Mr. Vettriano sold after he became a professional artist. In 1992, it sold — by his account — for 3,000 pounds, or about $1,270 at today’s exchange rate. “A thousand went to the auction house, a thousand to the taxman and I was left with £1,000,” he told The Sunday Post in 2021.
This was early in Mr. Vettriano’s career, though he was already in his 40s. He had sold only a few paintings by then.
“The Singing Butler” was sold again at auction in 2004, this time for around £750,000, making it the most valuable work of art to emerge from Scotland at the time.
It depicts a couple dancing under a cloudy sky on what appears to be a beach. A man and a woman stand nearby holding umbrellas. All four of the people in the painting have their heads turned away from the viewer. The painting evokes a sense of nostalgia that often permeates Vettriano’s paintings.
“I think it’s just escapism,” Mr. Vettriano told “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2004 by way of explaining the popularity of the painting. “It’s where we’d all like to be at some point in our lives, and when you’re sitting on a sort of cold, wet, damp Tuesday afternoon and you’ve got that on your wall, I think it’s uplifting. It sort of enriches your spirit.”
The man on the right is a butler and, according to Mr. Vettriano, he is definitely singing. But what?
“Fly me to the moon, let me sing among those stars, a Sinatra classic,” Mr. Vettriano told Scotland on Sunday, a Scottish newspaper, in 2004, referring to “Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)” by Frank Sinatra.
Largely on the basis of “The Singing Butler,” Mr. Vettriano would become one of the most popular artists in the world. Reproductions of his paintings, which have appeared on everyday items such as mugs and mouse pads dating back decades, number in the millions.
Even as his fame skyrocketed, critics largely rejected him.
Mr. Vettriano was never a critical darling, nor a favorite of the art establishment. It was a sore point for Mr. Vettriano, who once displayed a 1989 rejection letter from the Edinburgh College of Art as part of an exhibition in 2022.
Duncan Macmillan, an art historian who wrote a book that covered more than 500 years of Scottish art, barely mentioned Mr. Vettriano at the height of his fame, a snub that Mr. Vettriano called a “verbal violence” in his CBS interview.
The critic Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian in 2011, described Mr. Vettriano’s paintings as “emotionally trite and technically drab.” Museums, particularly the most storied ones in Britain, have not typically shown his paintings.
“They don’t like an artist who is as popular as me because it takes away part of their authority,” Mr. Vettriano once told Radio Times. “If they want to ignore me, let them.”
‘The Singing Butler’ was reimagined by Banksy.
The British street artist Banksy reproduced Mr. Vettriano’s most famous painting, but replaced the woman with the umbrella with two people in hazmat suits carrying a drum of toxic waste onto the beach. Titled “Crude Oil (Vettriano),” it was first displayed in 2005 and was eventually purchased by Mark Hoppus, a founder of the pop-punk bank Blink-182.
Banksy’s version goes to auction on Tuesday, when it is expected to fetch a minimum of £3 million, or about $3.8 million.
Vettriano did not intend to become an artist.
Born Jack Hoggan in the eastern county of Fife, Scotland, on Nov. 17, 1951, Mr. Vettriano left school at around 16 to follow in his father’s footsteps as a coal miner.
When he turned 21, his girlfriend gave him a set of watercolors, and he spent his 20s and 30s painting, often copying the pieces of famous artists to hone his technique, under the name Hoggan. He eventually adopted a version of his mother’s maiden name, Vettrino, as his surname.
“I did that to distinguish between what I could see was my own style developing,” Mr. Vettriano told The Courier and Advertiser in 2022. “I didn’t want to get contaminated by the copies.”
His big break would come more than two decades later, in the late 1980s. Around the time he was rejected by the Edinburgh College of Art, Mr. Vettriano submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual exhibition. They sold within minutes; they were his first professional sales, ones that Mr. Vettriano later said “marked my arrival.”
“If you put some of the Impressionists, some of the old masters, Cézanne, Degas, a few Scottish artists and you mix it up,” Mr. Vettriano told The Courier and Advertiser, “what comes out is me.”