About Jack Vettriano

Born in 1951 as Jack Hoggan, Vettriano grew up in the industrial coastal city of Mehil in Fife, Scotland. Jack Vettriano left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer and for his twenty-first birthday, a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints. From then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint.

With parentage of Italian origin, Jack Vettriano has been working for the last two decades as a very successful painter. His original art as well as posters and prints of his motifs are widely admired and collected. The style of Vettriano’s art is often described as sentimental, mysterious, and often melancholic.

His first painting was a copy of Monet’s poppy fields, signed with the name Jack Hoggan. In 1988, Jack changed his name to Jack Vettriano, by adopting his mother's maiden name and in the same year, Jack Vettriano exhibited two of his paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. The submission of his paintings aroused public interest in his work, and Jack Vettriano soon secured enough income to devote himself fully to being an artist.

Vettriano's best selling and most acclaimed painting 'The Singing Butler' was originally dismissed at the summer exhibition of the Royal academy in 1992, yet years later it sold for over £700,000 at auction.