Jack Vettriano was never a ‘great' artist – yet his work was impossible to ignore

Telegraph

03-03-2025

Jack Vettriano, the virally popular Scottish painter whose death, at the age of 73, was announced on March 3, wasn't a great artist, in the sense that one day we will see a retrospective of his work at the Tate. His easy-to-parse erotica, such as Along Came a Spider (2004), made him rich: when I met him, in his bizarrely pristine Knightsbridge studio in 2007, he didn't deny rumours that he was pulling in half a million pounds every year. But his name was also a byword for 'kitsch'.
Still, he appeared to be devoid of pretensions to greatness – telling me, in that interview, that his most famous painting, The Singing Butler (1992), which once sold at auction for almost £745,000 (then a record for a Scottish picture), was 'by far not the best painting to ever come out of Scotland'. 'My paintings are very accessible, very narrative,' he said. 'People buy into the vision that I try to put on canvas – it's as simple as that.'
Isn't such self-deprecating psychological complexity compelling? Here, I sensed, was someone blessed with worldly success who craved recognition of a different sort, while understanding that it would never be forthcoming. No wonder he could be brittle, even paranoid. On the inside, it seemed, he was suffering from a Salieri-style predicament of self-lacerating self-awareness, which would excite any dramatist.
It's tempting to belittle Vettriano's work, with its default monotonous look that we might characterise as 'softcore fantasy', with a kinky undertow, which now sits so uneasily in the MeToo era. All those sleek, anonymous figures in his naff pictures, dressed in sharp tuxedos or lingerie, and smoking cigarettes – intended, I guess, to evoke some vaguely old-school, glamorous notion of romance – belong to the same imaginary universe as the characters in another raunchy cultural phenomenon: EL James's Fifty Shades trilogy of erotic novels.
Yet, it's worth recalling that Vettriano was self-taught – he grew up in poverty, and only took up painting after a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolours for his 21st birthday – so we should be mindful of lapsing into snobbery. Besides, although none of his pictures – which he compared to 'old railway posters and the covers of pulp-fiction novels' – exhibits any of the depth we expect from powerful, first-rate art, many of them do have a curious power of sorts, in that they appeal to a massive audience (including Jack Nicholson and Alex Ferguson, who've both acquired his work).
Consider The Singing Butler, Vettriano's paean to an antiquated class system, with its hunched, windswept, umbrella-wielding subordinates playing second fiddle to a pair of unruffled, moneyed protagonists, slowly twirling on a sodden beach. (Its barefoot heroine wears – of course! – a figure-hugging crimson evening gown, and matching opera gloves.) A 'remix' by the street artist Banksy, Crude Oil (Vettriano) (2005), will be offered for sale, with a high estimate of £5 million, at Sotheby's on March 4.
The Singing Butler belongs to an elite category of pictures that punch through to the mainstream. Vladimir Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl (1952), aka 'The Green Lady', is another member of this club, along with – to pick a couple of 'high art' examples – Hokusai's Great Wave of 1831, or, say, Frederic Leighton's Flaming June (1895).
Vettriano's blank paintings don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as anything by Leighton – and yet, because of their popularity, they cannot be ignored. This may sound like a strange achievement for an artist, but it is an achievement nonetheless.