Jack Vettriano, the immensely popular self-taught Neo-Realist artist, who by his own account painted to offer his audience escapism with his nostalgia-fuelled, romantic works, has died aged 73. He was found dead at his home in Nice, France, on 1 March.

Vettriano was an art market phenomenon, generating huge sales through poster reproductions of his work from the 1990s onwards and setting an auction record for any Scottish artist in 2004 with the sale of his painting The Singing Butler (1992).

To critics focused on high-end contemporary art, Vettriano remained resolutely “unchic”. For Jonathan Jones, writing in The Art Newspaper in 2014, Vettriano existed, like the guerrilla muralist Banksy (who referenced Vettriano in his own work), “outside the charmed circle” of high-art criticism, in company with “Lucian Freud and David Hockney, the newspaper cartoonists Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell … portrait painters like Jonathan Yeo, ‘outsider’ artists and artists from the non-Western world who do not embrace the global contemporary style”. In his Portrait of the artist as a young girl (2006), the artist Grayson Perry had raised critical hackles by writing: “Next year I think the judges [of the Turner Prize] should nominate Jack Vettriano.”

Speaking on a BBC documentary in 2013, Vettriano said how wounded he had been when one critic accused him of “painting by numbers”. It was an attitude that he found “breathtaking”. “That’s not criticism,” he said, “it’s almost violence.”

An art fair ‘feeding frenzy’

In June 2002, Georgina Adam of The Art Newspaper witnessed a “feeding frenzy” at the Art London fair around the stand of the Portland Gallery, Vettriano’s representatives. “The queue to buy his canvases started at 9am for the 6.30pm opening of the fair,” Adam wrote. “By the afternoon the … Portland Gallery, was handing out numbered tickets, and as the opening evening got underway it was impossible even to get on to the stand. Fifty people wanted the 21 paintings on view; 20 sold that night at prices between £9,500 and £25,000, with the last one sold the following day.”

Two years later, in April 2004, Vettriano’s The Singing Butler was knocked down at Sotheby’s at Hopetoun House, for £744,800, against a £200,000 estimate, then a record for the work of any Scottish artist sold at auction. The painting—in which a couple in evening dress dance on an idealised beach watched over by a maid and the titular butler, each of them brandishing umbrellas against the weather—had been sold to the 2004 vendor for £1,800 at a 1992 exhibition, God’s Children, which included other Vettriano genre scenes set on breeze-swept beaches. The artist’s previous record at auction, £98,000, had been set in December 2003.

Other Vettriano works—there were 14 in the 2004 auction—”were also hard fought for by hundreds of bidders who had queued to get into the saleroom”, The Art Newspaper reported. “The Vettrianos accounted for almost £2m of the sale’s £3.3m total, and went for twice, three times and even ten times estimate. Only one painting not by Vettriano was in the list of top 10 prices.” In the month before the Sotheby’s sale, Melvyn Bragg had profiled the artist on the long-running ITV arts programme The South Bank Show, in Jack Vettriano: the people’s painter.

The Singing Butler is the epitome of the 1940s film-noir-nostalgic style established by Vettriano within years of his first successfully submitting work to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1988. Characters, sometimes scantily clad, sometimes in formal attire, are found in half-lit, dream-like, close-framed genre scenes, or posed on sunny, idealised, Sorolla-like beaches. His subject, he said in 2013, was love and courtship. His record-setting painting was reimagined by Banksy in Crude Oil (Vettriano) (2005), which goes on sale at Sotheby’s London on 4 March, with an estimate of between £3m and £5m.

Speaking on a 2013 BBC documentary, Vettriano talked about his turn from painting interior scenes to beaches, and of the avowedly escapist nature of his painting, which he said was designed to forget the harshness of his teenage years working down a Fifeshire coalmine (as his father and grandfather had done before him). “Where do people fall in love?” Vettriano said, “Beaches.” “Perhaps,” he said of The Singing Butler, “it gives you some hope. It’s a fantasy. If you’re living in Grimsby on a wet Tuesday afternoon, you might be carried away with it.”

Market’s ‘appetite for the glamorous’ revealed

In a May 2004 editorial, looking back on the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, The Art Newspaper remarked: “Philosophers and writers such as Elaine Scarry and Denis Donoghue have recently gone public in singing beauty’s rediscovered charms, and it is no accident, whatever the high-minded may think, that the market triumph of Jack Vettriano’s paintings reflects an appetite for the glamorous. The days of the ugly, the mad, the sad and the brutal are numbered.”

To Elspeth Moncrieff, writing about the “Vettriano effect” in The Art Newspaper the previous year, Jack Vettriano was, like the Somerset-based Paul Roberts, one of several Realists “who can handle paint superbly and are currently much in vogue”. Galleries who represented Realist artists, Moncrieff reported, see “a commercial swing towards figurative painting at the moment as people seek something tangible and reassuring in tough times”.

The success of the 2004 auction raised questions around why the Neo-Realist Vettriano—a commercial success but critically ignored if not openly disdained—was represented in no public collection in the UK.

Speaking on a BBC documentary in 2013, Vettriano said he would love to receive recognition from the Scottish National Galleries or from the Tate. His self-portrait The Weight had gone on long-term display in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2011. In 2013 he was the subject of a retrospective—with a catalogue introduction by the novelist A.L. Kennedy—of more than 100 examples of his work at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. Some of this best-known works featured in the show—including The Singing Butler, The Billy Boys (1994), Bluebird at Bonneville (1996) and Dance me to the end of Love (1998)—which set a new attendance record for the gallery.

A son of the Fifeshire coalmines

He was born Jack Hoggan in Methil, Fifeshire, in 1951, later adopting his mother’s maiden name when he started to concentrate on art. At 16 he followed his father and grandfather into work in the local coalmine. As a boy he would draw on paper betting slips brought home by his Italian grandfather. When he was 21 he was given watercolours by a girlfriend. As an amateur, self-trained artist, he told the BBC in 2017, he had to develop a style that “gives a quick result”. So he copied the masters. “You name them and I’ve copied them: Monet, Degas, Caravaggio. Put them all in a pot and stir it.”

Speaking in 2013, he said he never attended art classes for long, as he preferred to work alone, without anyone around him. He preferred to work from photographs of his models, so that they could leave. “I felt a bit fraudulent about working from photographs,” he said, but reckoned that many artists did the same. In a nod to the influence of cinema on his work he said: “I am like a director but you get one shot. It’s purely escapism. It takes you somewhere else.”

His high-profile collectors included the actors Jack Nicholson and Robbie Coltrane, the football manager Alex Ferguson and the librettist Tim Rice. In a 2006 The Art Newspaper survey of art students, questioned on their artistic influences, Marcel Duchamp finished first, and Vettriano finished tied for 28th, in company with Michelangelo, El Greco, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Michelangelo and Grayson Perry.

In 2017 he was one of three Scottish artists, in company with John Byrne and Rachel Maclean, to be commissioned to paint a portrait to celebrate the comedian Billy Connolly’s 75th birthday. The challenge there, he said on television at the time, was how anxious he was that the sitter would like the finished result.

Speaking about his work in 2013, Vettian said: “The last thing I am is cutting edge. I like to examine love and religion.” He also reflected on his love of craft, in any line of work. And he hoped that people would realise that: “At least I tried. At least I am prepared to put it up on the wall. And you can have a go at it if you like.”

Jack Hoggan (Jack Vettriano), born Methil, Fife 17 November 1951; OBE 2003; married 1980 Gail McCormack (marriage dissolved 1988); died Nice, France 1 March 2025.