Marking a year since the death of celebrated Scottish painter Jack Vettriano, National Galleries of Scotland is showcasing two works by the artist, celebrating his life and prolific career. The artist’s estate has leant two self-portraits, Portrait of the Artist and Homage to Fontana?, for six years – the former is on display now, until it is swapped for the latter in early 2029.
A self-taught painter, Vettriano enjoyed a strong following in Scotland and internationally for evocative and narrative works and that international standing made a huge contribution to the profile of Scottish arts and culture, even breaking UK and Scottish records: in 2004 his painting The Singing Butler achieved a record price for a Scottish painting at auction and went on to become the UK’s best-selling art print (the work even inspired Banksy, whose reimagining of the painting sold in March 2025 for £4.3million.) Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Tim Rice are among collectors of his work.
Painted in 1993 – a year after The Singing Butler – Portrait of the Artist is an early-career work, depicting the artist taking a break from painting at his Edinburgh flat, where he had a studio, with light, shade and contemplative expression combining with paint-spattered clothes emphasising the task at hand. Homage to Fontana? was painted in 1999 and in title and slashes in the painted canvas reference Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), known for his signature slashed canvases in the 1950s and 60s.
Born Jack Hoggan, the artist grew up in the coastal mining village of Methil in Fife, and after leaving school at 15, followed his father as a mining engineer, moving on to jobs in management services, and took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s when a girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours for his birthday. From then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint, learning by copying Old Masters, Impressionists, Surrealists and a plethora of Scottish artists, taking inspiration from studying the collection at Kirkcaldy Galleries. He went on to produce figurative works, described as ‘more or less autobiographical’, working from photographs of scenes he staged with models in his studio. The paintings evoke the style of the 1940s and 50s, often set, in his words, in ‘sombre and sordid interiors’, using dramatic light and shade in a narrative of relationships.
Moving to Edinburgh, he took his mother’s last name, Vettriano and enjoyed a breakthrough in 1988 two works he had submitted to the Royal Scottish Academy’s Annual Exhibition sold within the first day, and he was courted by several galleries thereafter, with his first solo exhibition in Edinburgh in 1992, and he to gather international acclaim, leading to exhibitions in London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and New York. His first major retrospective, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in 2013, broke visitor records, attracting more than 136,000 over its five-month run, over time earning him the soubriquet of The People’s Painter.
