Jack Vettriano Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, b. 1951 -

Jack Vettriano, OBE (born Jack Hoggan, 17 November 1951), is a Scottish painter. His 1992 painting The Singing Butler became a best-selling image in Britain.

Jack Vettriano was born in St. Andrews in Fife[2] and grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, about 30 minutes south of his birthplace. He was raised in poverty; he lived with his mother, father and older brother in a spartan miner’s house, sharing a bed with his brother and wearing hand-me-down clothes. From the age of 10, his father sent him out delivering papers and milk, cleaning windows and picking potatoes — any job that would earn money. His father took half his earnings.

Vettriano left school at 16 and later became an apprentice mining engineer. For a short time in the late 1960s, he had a summer job as a bingo caller at the Beachcomber Amusements on Leven Promenade. Vettriano took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s, when a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours for his 21st birthday. His earliest paintings, under his birth name "Jack Hoggan", were copies or pastiches of impressionist paintings;[2][5] his first painting was a copy of Claude Monet's Poppy Fields. Much of his influence came from studying paintings at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery. In 1984, Vettriano first submitted his work to the Shell-sponsored art exhibition in the museum.

In 1987, when he was 36, Vettriano left his wife Gail, seeking to emulate Paul Gauguin. He quit his job in educational research, and moved to Edinburgh, where he adopted his mother's maiden name. He applied to study Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, but his portfolio was rejected