Hyped as Britain’s most popular artist – one of his works recently sold for a record-breaking £750,000 – Jack Vettriano is adored by millions who couldn’t care less that art critics deride him. But there’s a side to the painter his fans are unaware of.

Lynn Barber

Until three months ago, it was quite easy to ignore Jack Vettriano, provided you kept your eyes averted from The Singing Butler greetings cards in WH Smith. But in April, at auction in Edinburgh, the original painting sold for £744,800, making it the most expensive Scottish painting ever to come under the hammer. So even if one doesn’t take Vettriano seriously as a painter, one has to take him seriously as an investment.

He painted The Singing Butler in 1992 and submitted it for the Royal Academy summer show, where it was rejected. His dealer then offered it to the Scottish Arts Council which didn’t even reply, so he sold it privately for £3,500. Four years later, it changed hands for £5,000 – and now has changed hands again for three quarters of a million.

There were another 12 Vettrianos in the Edinburgh auction which all went for six figures. A tiny study for The Administration of Justice (one of his kinkier efforts) fetched £175,000. Vettriano didn’t attend the auction and I asked his dealer, Tom Hewlett, why – wasn’t he interested? ‘Oh, he’s massively interested, but he doesn’t want to go and seem to be gloating. That’s just not his style. I was with him that evening in Scotland and he was still in a state of shock.’

Anyway, in the wake of The Singing Butler sale, there will be even more attention on Vettriano’s new show, ‘Affairs of the Heart’, which opens at London’s Portland Gallery on 19 June. It is his first show for four years; he was meant to have one in New York but it was cancelled in the wake of 9/11. But even without having a show, his public profile has been steadily increasing. He always complains of lack of recognition but he has been receiving accolades by the bucketload – a respectful South Bank Show, a ditto Desert Island Discs, a couple of honorary degrees and the OBE last year.

As a consequence, his prices have shot up. At his last show, they were between £30-50,000, now they are £35-£130,000. But don’t bother rushing to the Portland Gallery with your chequebook – all but three of the paintings have already been sold, to collectors who have been on the waiting list for years. Sir Alex Ferguson is the latest addition to the Vettriano owners’ club; others include Terence Conran, Raymond Blanc (who has a ‘Vettriano suite’ at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons), Robbie Coltrane, Tim Rice, Alan Coren and Jack Nicholson. (Tom Hewlett recently asked Nicholson if he’d be interested in selling, but the answer was no.)

But there is still absolutely no interest in his work from the public galleries – there is only one Vettriano in a museum and that is in Kirkcaldy, Fife, his home town.

The usual factoid about Jack Vettriano is that he is ‘the most popular artist in Britain’ – more popular than Monet, than Renoir, than Van Gogh. The tenuous basis for this claim is that a few of his paintings – most obviously The Singing Butler – have been widely reproduced on prints, posters, greetings cards, on coffee mugs, on umbrel las, on Marks & Spencer biscuit tins, and have sold in their millions – 12 million legally, but probably 10 times that in pirated versions. Vettriano’s income from these reproductions runs to more than half a million a year.

When people think of a Vettriano, they probably think of one of these reproductions, which will be set on a beach, featuring people in elegant Forties or Fifties clothes, possibly with a maid or butler in tow. They are a very feminine vision of ‘the high life’. However, such paintings are only a tiny part of his oeuvre and, moreover, a part he no longer produces. His last beach scene was painted in 1996. What he mainly paints are low-life night scenes, which carry a heavy charge of kinky eroticism. They are not pornographic exactly – the women rarely undress beyond their underwear and the men are fully clothed – but they are dark, claustrophobic, sleazy.

So what Vettriano is famous for is not what he actually does, and I imagine that many of the nice M&S customers who cherish their Singing Butler biscuit tins would be quite shocked to see, say, Scarlet Ribbons, Lovely Ribbons in which a girl in black stockings and suspenders is bound to an artist’s easel, or Fetish, in which a man thoughtfully contemplates a woman’s stiletto.

In short, there are two Jack Vettrianos; nice JV who goes in for butlers and ballgowns and nasty JV who goes in for sex games. And, evidently, nasty JV is winning because the butlers have not appeared for eight years. But what is common to both types of painting is the very strong narrative content, which invites the viewer to make up the backstory. Why is this couple in evening dress dancing on a windy beach, with a butler and maid in attendance? Come to that, why is the painting called The Singing Butler , when there is nothing to suggest that the butler is singing? (In fact, it would be very difficult for him to sing because he doesn’t appear to have a head, just a bowler hat attached to his collar.)

And the couples in his airless hotel rooms – are they adulterers meeting for a quickie or hookers with clients? Anyway, the fact that there is all this exciting ‘story’ in the images makes it easy to ignore the deadly flatness of the technique.

This is the answer to the question: why don’t art critics take Vettriano seriously? Because there is nothing of any interest in the way he paints – Vettriano is to painting what Jeffrey Archer is to prose. Nevertheless, he is very interesting both as a person and as a phenomenon; a self-taught painter who, by depicting his own fantasies, has somehow managed to reach an audience who don’t normally take any interest in art. He is also – I was pleased to discover – a very modest, articulate, friendly interviewee.

He lives in a most unlikely setting for an artist, a smart block of mansion flats, with porter, just behind Harrods. The largeish front room is both sitting room and studio, the studio consisting of an easel and a messy table of paints, the sitting room consisting of a couple of sofas, a glass-fronted cabinet of high-heeled shoes (his fetish) and countless overflowing ashtrays.

The whole place is very much a bachelor pad – the kitchen features a gaping rubbish sack full of takeaway cartons. But he is a courteous host, offering me tea or an Italian frizzante mineral water he is keen on. Unusually for an artist – dare I say for a Scot? – he doesn’t drink.

I asked if he was nervous about his new exhibition and he said: ‘Yes, I think more than ever, because of The Singing Butler, people will be sharpening their pencils. But I wouldn’t want to be anything else. The day you’re sitting back saying, “Oh well, another exhibition”, I think you should pack it in.’

The exhibition contains some departures for him – studies of individual women, fully clothed, which he describes as: ‘Not portraits exactly, but just a kind of adoration of a woman and the clothes that she wears.’ Women’s clothes, especially shoes, are important to him. He used to trawl the charity shops in Edinburgh to find the ones he fancied; now he relies on his regular models to do it for him.

He uses the same models over and over because: ‘I like things to be kept tight. I don’t want people going round saying, “I’m Jack Vettriano’s model.” That’s why I don’t use catwalk models or models who think they’re models.’

In the past, when he needed a man in the picture he always used himself because: ‘I’m discreet and cheap and I wanted to limit the number of people who actually saw what goes on in my studio.’ But lately, he says, he’s started using a man model because: ‘I’m now beginning to look a wee bit like a kind of lecherous older man and there’s only so much surgery I can give myself!’

He gets his ideas mainly from song lyrics, occasi
onally from newspaper stories. When two or three ideas have gelled, he gets a model round, takes photos and then paints from the photos. But why has he never painted from life? ‘I tried to and I just couldn’t do it. I was too nervous. This is probably to do with being self-taught. When you’re teaching yourself, the thought of somebody sitting in front of you half-naked just petrifies you.’

But now, surely, he could do it? ‘I just couldn’t have anybody around and it’s partially to do with solitude and partially to do with having to make banal conversation.’

He felt very envious the other day when he saw a photograph of Lucian Freud in his studio with Brigadier Parker Bowles posing for him and he thought: ‘God, I’d love to be able to do that.’ But then he thought: ‘I would love to have the photograph, but I wouldn’t like the process.’

He still has hang-ups about being self-taught. He didn’t acquire his first paints till he was 22 and then started copying paintings from library books, everyone from Dali to Caravaggio to Monet. He applied to art school in his thirties but was rejected. When he became successful, he thought about inventing a story that he went to Goldsmith’s but realised he couldn’t get away with it. His friend and mentor, Scottish art critic W Gordon Smith, assured him that being self-taught was fine but he still has this hankering to be at least acknowledged by the art establishment.

Instead, he has to put up with patronising headlines such as ‘The miner who outsells Monet’ from the Mail on Sunday. He was never a miner, he never hewed coal, though he did serve an apprenticeship down the pits for four years. He was born Jack Hoggan in l951 and grew up in a mining village near Kirkcaldy, which he describes as ‘linoleum on the floor, baked beans on the plate and flying ducks on the walls’. His parents, he says, ‘didn’t give me a strict upbringing, they didn’t give me a good education, but they gave me a lot of love’ and he was delighted last year to take them to Buckingham Palace to collect his OBE. They often still watch the video, he says.

His ‘wee hobby’ of painting developed during his twenties and thirties to the detriment of his marriage which foundered after five years. By this time, he had moved into white-collar jobs as a personnel manager, and he spent a year in Bahrain where he had his first exhibition. But he was still essentially copying other artists. ‘I could see that I had something. I had a certain skill in those hands. What I didn’t have was ideas which were mine. But I just had to dig deeper and deeper.’

The breakthrough came in 1988, when he had two paintings accepted by the Royal Scottish Academy summer show. They sold on the first day and he had letters from three galleries offering to represent him. He never had to hawk his work round, for which he is eternally grateful, and he never had any bad experiences with dealers. He has a particularly good relationship with Tom Hewlett of the Portland Gallery, who is his friend as well as dealer.

As soon as he signed with a gallery, he gave up work, moved to Edinburgh and changed his name to Vettriano – his mother’s maiden name – to distance himself from all the copies he had painted as Jack Hoggan. He painted day and night and was immediately successful. But he deeply resents the idea that he set out to be a commercial painter, that he knew what the public wanted and gave it to them. On the contrary, he says: ‘Nobody was more astonished at the response than me.’ He dithered long and hard before agreeing to let his work be reproduced – it didn’t happen till 1995 – and says he was guided by thinking: ‘What would Monet or Van Gogh have done?’

In 1998, he moved down to London because he had become too visible in Edinburgh and attracted too many hangers-on. He was also beginning to become rather paranoid about tabloid attention. This came to a head in 1999 when the papers ran a story that he had been accused of stalking a woman in Edinburgh back in 1991. The police investigated the matter and brought no charges, but the press story made him so depressed, he stopped painting for months.

Even now he goes white at the memory: ‘I just don’t want to be reading about things that make me feel ashamed of myself. I think that’s the Scottish upbringing. My mother was quite ill over all that stalking stuff and I hated that she had to go through that. And I hated it more because it was nonsense.’

At one point, he said, he felt he didn’t dare go out for fear of what the press might report. But surely, I said, a bit of louche behaviour wouldn’t really damage his image? Nobody would faint with horror if Jack Vettriano was seen emerging from a lapdancing club. ‘No, but stalking is not louche behaviour!’ he thunders. ‘To put somebody into a state of a alarm is not louche behaviour! Louche behaviour might be me being photographed going into a hotel room with a couple of girls – that’s fine. But stalking is not. Stalking is a crime, and there’s a big difference between that and having a wee bit of sex fun.’

Point taken, but even so, I find his attitude to sex (or perhaps lust is the better word) deeply peculiar. He sees it everywhere; he thinks the whole world goes to sex shops and tries out bondage games; he says all men are shoe fetishists. Tom Hewlett told me: ‘Jack thinks that everybody else thinks about sex as much as he does. That’s what drives him and therefore he thinks it drives everybody. He once said, “Show me a man who’s never fancied a prostitute and I’ll show you a liar”, and I was thinking, “Oh really? I obviously lead a very dull life!”‘

But then Vettriano also seems to believe that casual sex is an incredibly addictive dangerous drug, like heroin; that if you once dabble in it, you will be dragged down and ruined. That is why his erotic paintings are so highly charged. These are not just couples meeting for a quick shag; these are couples hovering on the brink of perdition. He describes them as: ‘People who are basically unhappy because they’re driven by this need continually to have new partners, continually to reinvent themselves. And I just think there are a lot of people like that around, whether they admit it or not. Let’s be frank, the sex industry is massive and it’s full of middle-aged men who are, on the surface, very happy but have these raging desires. In other words, all of us.’

Does he still go to bars or brothels to get inspiration? ‘I’ve done it all. I’ve seen what I needed to see. It’s all there in my mind’s eye, and I haven’t done anything like that for some years. I think the problem with the sex industry is that the people who operate it are difficult people, and it’s a world of exploitation, and you don’t want to get too close to it. There are fetish clubs around which I just wouldn’t touch.

‘There’s been a lot said about what I’ve got up to and I said at the time I did it for research purposes and that was true. I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy it because I don’t think there’s a man alive who, if you said to him, “Look, through that room there are six girls all sitting in their underwear and you can have your pick” would say, “No”. So I’ve seen how it operates and it is quite fascinating, but it’s a fascination that is like drugs. Maybe just dip your toe into the water to see what it’s like but then walk away. For Christ’s sake, walk away. Because it’s not a recipe for happiness, for inner peace.’

Coo-er. So casual sex is dangerous, but then he says he can’t do lasting relationships either – he sees them as inimical to art. ‘I have a fear of domestic bliss, because I have a fear that it will take an edge off the work.’

However, he concedes, he is now in a relationship and trying to lead a more normal life. When he first became a professional painter, he could and would paint non-stop, but now, he says, he is deliberately slowing down.

‘I’ve tried very hard to lessen my work regime because my body can’t take it any more. I don’t live a particularly healthy lifestyle and I am in a relationship and I think you’ve got to try and balance things a bi
t better. Instead of saying, “To hell with it, I’m going to paint tonight”, you say, “No, let’s go and have dinner.” I’m trying more to, if you like, enjoy the things that success gives you.’

He has plenty to enjoy – a new house he has just bought in Oxford, a huge apartment in Kirkcaldy near his parents, the flat in Knightsbridge, his precious old Mercedes. But actually what he most enjoys is giving money away, either to his family or to charities. His dealer told me that he recently gave £75,000 to St Andrews University to subsidise underprivileged students. ‘That’s what I like about having money, that you have the power to enrich people’s lives. But I think, like all creative people, I can give material things much more than I can give of me and sometimes, if I’m honest I think that’s a kind of compensation.’

I asked him if he was as shocked by that £750,000 for The Singing Butler as I was, and he readily agreed: ‘Yes, it shocks me immensely. And I have to say this to you, Lynn, I will never ever claim that The Singing Butler is the best painting ever painted in Scotland, that is just nonsense.’

Well, good. The Jack Vettriano I met seemed entirely modest, sane and sensible, but I think I happened to catch him on a relatively sunny day. In other interviews, he has grumbled darkly about how there is a conspiracy to keep him out of the public galleries, and how he is the victim of an anti-heterosexual prejudice among homosexual art curators. I think the fact is that he swings wildly between different moods.

As Tom Hewlett told me: ‘Jack’s highs are higher, his lows lower than most people’s.’ These moods are reflected in his paintings – high life and low life, sunny beach scenes and claustrophobic night scenes. His last show was entirely dark; his new show has glimmerings of cheerfulness.

Will he ever paint another beach scene? ‘Well, the people who produce the prints keep pestering me, but because they want them, that’s why I won’t do them. But I do have an idea for one and I will do it eventually, but I’ve no desire to run down to Brighton just now and stare at the beach.’

A self-taught painter from the Scottish coalfields, Jack Vettriano is one of Britain’s highest-earning contemporary artists. But his work – figurative and erotic – is ignored by the press, which has shown more interest in his colourful private life.

A woman in a red dress dances with a tuxedo-clad man on a beach, in the rain, as a butler and a maid hold aloft two umbrellas. The Singing Butler, by the self-taught Scottish painter Jack Vettriano, is the bestselling fine art print in the UK, and the licensing agreement for this one image earns the artist £250,000 in royalties each year. Vettriano’s clients include Jack Nicholson, Sir Terence Conran and Robbie Coltrane, and his paintings typically sell for around £40,000. But as Conran, who commissioned Vettriano to paint the series of oils which hangs in his Bluebird restaurant complex in London, acknowledges, “Jack is not of the fine art world and there is a degree of misunderstanding about his work. I would never suggest Jack is a great artist in the manner of Francis Bacon, I don’t think he would claim to be. But he is an extremely competent artist in the Edward Hopper mould. He is extremely good with light and, in the paintings he did for Bluebird, he really understands the relationships between people.”

Tom Hewlett, Vettriano’s dealer for the past nine years, thinks the art establishment has punished him for the popularity of his style – described by the artist himself as a cross between 1930s railway posters and the covers of pulp fiction novels. “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. It’s very telling that Jack is so widely known and loved by the public yet many critics have never heard of him and he is rarely reviewed,” Hewlett says.

Duncan Macmillan, a Scottish art critic and author of Scottish Art 1460-2000, the definitive guide to the nation’s art, takes the opposite view: “He is the perfect example of the way in which there is a muddle about popularism: people seem to think that if you say something is bad you are being elitist when it is merely a statement of fact… I wish him no personal ill will and he is welcome to all the money he has made, but the reason I find Vettriano so frightening is that his work shows the extent to which even art has been compromised by the argument that the market is the most powerful thing, when it is the people controlling the market who are powerful. We have surrendered our right to judge, handed it over to other people, and that is a very dangerous thing to do.”

It is comments like these, and others more cutting, which precipitated Vettriano’s move from Scotland to London four years ago. Although he affects to brush them aside, it appears that the attitudes of critics, which oscillate between disdain and indifference, offend him more than he will admit. None of the big Scottish or English galleries has bought Vettriano’s work, though he did give a painting to Kirkcaldy museum near his childhood home. A little revelling in the outsider tag of the “got-at” artist is probably the only thing that gets him through.

It wasn’t so much the words of the critics, however, as the reaction of the public which pushed Vettriano southwards. “I think with the critics and Duncan Macmillan disliking my work I was getting the sympathy vote and that was not enjoyable because you start to feel like some sort of wimp,” he says. So, in 1998, he sold his home in Edinburgh and headed for Chelsea.

It was the latest stage in what has been a very long journey for the man born Jack Hoggan in a Fife mining community on November 17 1951. He was the second son of Charlotte and William Hoggan, who lived in a small miner’s cottage in Methilhill. Slagheaps and pit winding gear dotted the countryside around; the North sea brought winds cold enough to freeze the family’s bones. The Hoggans – there were four children in all – were not the poorest family in town, but money was a constant source of worry.

“My father was a miner and we lived in a miners’ row, we were quite poor. My father used to say whenever one of us was born they put another cup of water in the soup.” says Vettriano. “It is bloody hard when you put one foot out of the bed and it’s freezing cold linoleum, there’s no central heating and your mum hasn’t put the fire on yet. But it was really a very happy childhood – it was a working-class family trying to better themselves.”

His maternal grandfather, Peter Vettriano, an Italian immigrant, was one of the greatest influences on his early life -some 30 years later Jack took his surname. Art was not a familiar concept in the family home, but Jack liked to draw and his grandfather would bring home little pads of betting slips and tiny wooden pencils from the local bookmakers. For hours, Jack would sit doodling on the pads. “I used to love to draw on them – goalmouth incidents, birds’ nests. I had a thing about birds’ nests,” he says.

The confines of Methilhill seem limiting now, but back then young Jack aspired to little more. By his own admission, he was never much interested in school. He was always in the bottom stream, the one designed for those destined to be labourers, and he cared little. “I was a particularly bad student. I think one of the problems of growing up in that kind of working-class environment is that very early on you are gifted with this notion that there are snobs in this life and then there is you. And you don’t want to be like the snobs.”

His ambition stretched to following in the footsteps of his father, who left school at 14 to go down the pit. While at school, Jack took a series of part-time jobs for pocket money. The most lucrative of these was as a bingo caller in the seaside town of Leven. He memorised the numbers on one of the bingo machines and, two to three times a day, one of his friends would sit at the machine while he called them out, regardless of the numbers on the balls he was picking. The holiday makers were fleeced, but it kept him and his friends in cigarettes.

As his schooldays slipped by, so, too, did his opportunities. Not that he cared. “You develop these heroes in your mind,” he says. “My heroes would hang around on street corners smoking, they were hard men. I just wanted to leave school, buy clothes, maybe get a car, go dancing, pick up women, have that feeling where you’re king for a couple of summers. But then you are 40 and fat and you wake up one morning and realise your life is over.”

At 15, Jack left school bursting with braggadocio, but without even an apprenticeship to go to. He got a job in the Michael colliery filling sandbags. Then, within a year, he managed to secure an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. “I was down the pit when I was between 16 and 18, but it would be wrong to pretend that I got coal out of the pit,” he says. “For the first year, I carried the journeyman’s toolbag and learned to say something interesting when all I was thinking about was women. The rest of the time it was smoking and skiving.”

Away from the pit, he worked on his real passion: women. His corner of Fife was hardly a centre of sophistication, even by the more lax standard of the 60s, but it did at least boast two ballrooms: the Raith and the Burma. The women who populated them were all high heels, red lipstick and big hair – the sort of women he now eroticises in his paintings. The reality of the ballrooms, however, was a far cry from the glossy and nostalgic image he so often paints.

“We would stand in rows and pick out who we wanted – she was your first, she was your reserve and she was your desperation. Once they danced with you, you would ask them to go for a burger and Coke, then you would try to snog them with the onions dripping out of your burger. It was every man for himself when it came to getting the women home. Most of the time you didn’t have a car so you would have to go to the bus stop and there would be rows of you all lined up in the freezing cold trying to get a snog.”

As his apprenticeship n
eared an end, he decided that on his final day he would hand in his notice. In a local paper, he spotted an advert looking for young men to “train as an interviewer”. “Here was me thinking I was going to be the next Parkinson, but all I did was try to sell magazine subscriptions, for obscure titles, round the doors in Darlington.” He lasted a day before jumping on the first train to King’s Cross. In London he fared little better. A job as a trainee chef, and a bedsit landlady who would shout “where’s my teeth?” for much of the day, didn’t work out. Within a few months he was back home in Fife.

After a short stint as a barman, he managed to get a job as a personnel officer. Life, though, was the same round of boring work and bad dances. Strangely for a man of that era, however, alcohol was never a feature. As a youth Vettriano once found himself drunk on whisky and asleep in a hedge. He has rarely touched alcohol since. At 20, he met a primary school teacher, Ruth McIntosh, who became his girlfriend and changed his life. “I had never met a professional woman before, it was all girlfriends who were just factory girls,” he says. “I remember her saying to me, ‘If you don’t do something with your life you’re going to live and die in this town’.”

The first thing he did was to enrol in night classes at Kirkcaldy technical college which eventually led to a job with the local council. But, when he was 21, Ruth set him on an altogether more fateful path. “For my 21st birthday she gave me a box of watercolours and when I tried it I really enjoyed it. I would paint a couple of nights a week. I had so many fights with my parents because of the smell of turps coming out of the room and they would go mental when I made up still lives and left them until the fruit went all rotten. I had no idea what I wanted to paint and no confidence.”

Having little exposure to the world of art, Vettriano embarked on the only training he could contrive: he copied. Hardly an artist, from the Italian masters to the Impressionists and Dali, escaped his plagiaristic attentions. Despite the unorthodox methods, he became obsessed by art.

In 1979, he applied for a job as a management consultant in Bahrain. The pay on offer, tax-free, was around four times his Scottish salary. More than that, he knew there would be little in the Gulf state to distract him from his painting. It was a productive time and, in Bahrain, he held his first exhibition. Every painting was a copy or a contrived image completed to order for one of the expats.

When he returned to Edinburgh a year later he met his future wife, Gail Cormack. For a time, they both worked for her father’s newspaper distribution business. When he married, Vettriano gained a stepdaughter, Victoria, whom he adopted. He had enough money in his pocket to buy a flat outright in Kirkcaldy. After taking a couple of uninspiring but decently paid jobs he quit work and began painting full time.

By 1988, he had begun to develop his style, loosely inspired by film noir. That year he submitted two paintings – one of Gail, Model in a White Slip , and another of a couple in a dancehall, Saturday Night – to the Royal Scottish Academy’s summer exhibition. After having painted so many copies under the name Hoggan, he decided to switch to his mother’s maiden name, Vettriano. It helped that the name fitted so well with the artistic style he was developing – and the dark and dangerous image he had begun cultivating for himself. He is tall, stocky and always unshaven. His curly hair is swept back; he dresses in monochrome; he is undoubtedly vain. “I’ve got to admit, it’s a great name,” he says. Both paintings sold within hours of going on display and his career took off. But within months his marriage was over. “I wanted every spare moment to be painting and I was selfish,” he says. “My wife and I decided to split and I moved my paints into the living room and I would paint until three in the morning.”

The divorce was amicable enough and, until recently, he and his wife remained on speaking terms. His relationship with his adopted daughter, however, quickly fizzled out. “Victoria by this time was a teenager and I don’t think she needed me any more than I needed her, in the sense of fatherly need. She wasn’t mine and I was only partially responsible for her, I didn’t feel any amazing sense of fatherhood,” he says.

During the following years, Vettriano began exhibiting and selling more and more. In 1991, W Gordon Smith, then art critic for Scotland on Sunday, began championing his work. In 1992, Vettriano mounted his first London exhibition, God’s Children. The paintings sold but he got little media exposure. Then, in early 1993, he began his partnership with Tom Hewlett at London’s Portland Gallery.

“What first attracted me to Jack’s work was the same as what attracts everybody to it: there’s a narrative which invites you to continue the story,” Hewlett says. “They’re like a moment caught in time and you continue the story in your head.” Perhaps in part because of his origins, perhaps in part because he is disliked by the critics and sales are his only external measure of success, Vettriano has always adopted a businesslike attitude towards his art. When Hewlett said his work was being undervalued, and that the right price for a particular painting he had seen might be nearer £10,000 than the £6,000-£7,000 he was used to, Vettriano agreed to be represented by him. “I remember seeing a television programme about artists and somebody said when you see them together at exhibitions they talk about perspective and the like,” he says. “But when they get into the taxi all they talk about is who is making most.”

As his career soared, Vettriano’s private life swung between a series of one-night stands and unfortunate encounters with married women. He is intensely private – friends say they are never aware whether he has a current girlfriend – but he admits he has not had a long-term relationship since he split from his wife. In his self-portraits, he tends to portray himself as a somewhat urbane Lothario: a black suit, white shirt, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and more than a hint that something darker lies behind. It is an image he obviously rather enjoys.

“Since I came to the public eye, I have never been linked with anyone romantically, therefore I have always been someone who relied on outside pleasure, pleasure outside normal relationships. I couldn’t deny that I have enjoyed that image, but it can all go horribly wrong,” he says.

His work is largely concerned with sex which, he thinks, is crucial to our understanding of human behaviour and history. “I just happen to think it is pretty much fundamental, everybody everywhere is driven by the urge to do it. It is a powerful force and only the strong and the happy are able to resist it.”

The sex Vettriano portrays, however, is faintly seedy and never loving. His women are invariably clad in stilettos – he keeps a collection in his studio – and stockings. Many are semi-naked while his men, in contrast, are usually clothed.

This work has an autobiographical aspect, as Vettriano explains. “I think being the kind of creative person I am, the downside is that you are pushed to try out things. I am not going to paint prostitutes unless I have some experience of them. I am not going to paint lap dancers unless I have experience of them.”

There is, of course, a flip side to the image and Vettriano’s penchant for casual sex and seduction. Just before Christmas 1999, a Scottish tabloid alleged that the previous year Vettriano had stalked a woman in Edinburgh. “I was absolutely astonished by it because anybody who knows me even slightly will know that it is very difficult to get me to leave my studio let alone stalk someone. Anyone who knows me knows that I would never put anyone in a state of alarm. It doesn’t matter how much you know it is rubbish, it still hurts, particularly for my family who suddenly find themselves reading a newspaper with all this rot in it.”

When the story was published, Vettriano’s mot
her was horrified. She took to her bed for two weeks, ashamed to face the neighbours. Vettriano himself sank into a depression which was to last six months. When the Spectator repeated the allegations his lawyers forced the magazine to withdraw them. Vettriano admits that he knew the woman involved. While painting at his Edinburgh studio, he noticed her from the window. One day he left a note on her car windscreen, inviting her to an exhibition. They exchanged a few phone calls. She said she was going back to an old boyfriend. And that, says Vettriano, was the end of that. When the allegations were made the police questioned him, but they took no action. “If any of the allegations were true I would have been prosecuted,” he says.

Whatever its veracity, the story plunged Vettriano into one of the darkest periods of his life. He constantly shuttled between London and Fife. He painted only a very little; what he did was not worth the oils, he says. The tabloid story also took the edge from what should have been a great time: his first exhibition in New York had been a runaway success. Buyers from Britain jumped on planes and literally queued round the block to get first option on his work. “We had to operate a ticket system where the first person in the queue got the first chance to buy and the second person couldn’t buy until the first person had bought. It was insane,” he says. In America, though, he was again ignored by the critics.

This does not, however, affect his output. Vettriano paints with the fervour of a work-crazed insomniac. In the dead of night, when the rest of London is asleep or dragging itself to one last club or party, the glare of artificial daylight powers from his Chelsea studio window. He paints furiously, always completing the work in one sitting. He never allows the paint to dry before he has finished and he never goes back to a work. At his most prolific, he can produce three paintings a week.

“What I try to do is develop craft,” he says. “Lucian Freud is someone I admire greatly because of his craft. I am not a great fan of Brit Art because it lacks craft. It’s astonishing, though, how an unmade bed or a shark in formaldehyde does take on a completely different effect when it is placed in the middle of a room.”

And for Vettriano, there is always the refuge of sex. Even that, though, is as bittersweet as his success. “When you have been responsible for someone else’s unhappiness, when you wake up and go to a strange bathroom, it is not a pleasant feeling. But the next night it’s gone. It is not a lasting feeling. You just keep on doing what you want to do.” In his life, then, as in his art.