Jack Vettriano: A retrospective on his passing

By Lucien Wiley

Even if you don’t know his name, or have any real knowledge of his oeuvre, you’ve likely seen at least one of Jack Vettriano’s paintings in passing. His most famous, The Singing Butler, which depicts a man in evening tails dancing with a woman in a sharp red dress on a stark beach while a butler in a bowler hat and a maid hold umbrellas over them. Despite the windswept nature of the scene, the dancing couple seems untouched by it, and all four figures have their faces turned away from the viewer. It’s elegant, mysterious, and painted in a way that’s almost realist without being realistic, in Vettriano’s distinct figurative style. This painting, which, when sold at auction in 2004 was the most expensive painting by a Scottish painter in history.

Jack Vettriano, The Singing Butler, 1992, oil on canvas.

Despite his commercial success, Vettriano, who passed away at the start of this month, was never really accepted by much of the art world, with his aforementioned style, reminiscent of the aesthetics of Film Noir with its cinematic composition and lighting, commonly dismissed by critics as being sentimental, meaningless, and populist. The unmentioned element at the core of this critique can be found in the epithet he was often given: Jack Vettriano The People’s Painter.

He truly was an ex nihilo artistic talent. Born Jack Hoggan in 1951 to an extremely poor family of coal miners in the Fife village of Methil, he worked odd jobs from the age of 10 onwards to support his family, with his father taking half of his earnings. In his mid-teens, he dropped out of school to become an apprentice mining engineer, working as a bingo caller in the summer to make ends meet. He began to teach himself to paint after receiving a watercolor set as a gift when he turned 21, painting copies and pastiches of impressionist works on display in nearby museums such as the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery under his birth name.

Jack Vettriano, The Weight (Self-Portrait), 2010, oil on canvas, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

In 1987, seeking to emulate Paul Gauguin, he left his job, adopted his mother’s maiden name of Vettriano, and applied to study Fine Arts at the University of Edinburgh, where he was summarily rejected. The next year, he submitted two paintings, Model in a White Slip and Saturday Night, to the Scottish National Academy’s annual show, both of which sold within the first day. This would set a pattern for much of the rest of his career, critical disdain coupled with commercial success.

Jack Vettriano, Exit Eden, 2006, oil on canvas.

I would be remiss to cover Vettriano’s work without mentioning the criticism of his depiction of women. Some of his pieces have a decidedly erotic element, and a common critique leveled against him is that “his women struggle to keep their clothes on”, with many of his female models painted half-clothed and wearing stilletos, like a noir femme fatale, and those that aren’t seem, to a degree, objectified. This, however, is far from the sum total of his works, and, to a degree, he objectifies all of the people in his paintings, using them as props for a story, actors in a movie. His pieces are snapshoteque, capturing a single moment in what the viewer can imagine is a much larger story, with his use of lighting reinforcing the almost cinematic nature of the scenes he paints. In the best examples of this, such as Bluebird at Bonneville and Elegy for The Dead Admiral, they feel far more A24 than Film Noir, with their use of distance, staging, and symmetry to convey the sense of a story in motion, leaving the viewer curious as to what happens once the metaphorical film still is unpaused.

Jack Vettriano, Bluebird at Bonneville, 1997, oil on canvas.

This cinematic style gave his paintings broad popularity and garnered criticism as “slick and empty”, art designed to be sold as scores of cheap prints and appreciated by philistines. This critique does have a hint of truth to it in that his art was broadly accessible, with prints people could afford, and with their often-complex themes of humanity, nostalgia, and narrative presented in a way that eschewed complex presentation for its own sake. Tom Hewlett, his long-time art dealer, would often respond to Vettriano’s critics with this bon mot “If you have a painting that is simple to understand, that the ordinary man can understand, it rather puts the critic out of a job”.

And Vettriano was no mass-market art populist in the vein of the infamously-kitschy Thomas Kinkade. His work, in its depiction of people and spaces, to me is reminiscent of Edward Hopper, especially the aforementioned Elegy for The Dead Admiral, which, despite its vastly different subject matter (a formal meal on a stark, bright beach vs. a clean, mostly empty bar at night), immediately calls to mind Hopper’s famous Nighthawks.

Jack Vettriano, Elegy for the Dead Admiral, 1994, oil on canvas.

There is no denying that, from a technical standpoint, Vettriano was a highly competent painter, a fact made more impressive by his lack of formal arts education, and his use of highly accessible artistic tools. (the women in red from The Singing Butler was based of an image of an Irish actress in the 1987 Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual) In subject matter itself, much of the criticism of his work, while not entirely invalid, carries a decidedly elitist undertone, though some of his work did have decidedly more complex themes than others. All in all, though, it was art, and good, accessible art at that. If the purpose of art is to carry themes, to evoke emotion, to stick in the memory of memory of its viewer, and to maybe, just maybe, be aesthetically pleasant, Jack Vettriano, whose paintings, in one way or another, touched the lives of millions was possibly a more successful artist than many of the critical darlings of the British art establishment over the past few decades. Even if it is commercial, there’s no moral difference between painting to sell thousands of prints, and making a single piece whose sole goal is to be sold at monumental expense; if you disagree, I’ve got a very expensive shark to sell you.