Jack Vettriano

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2004

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Jack Vettriano.

Jack Vettriano is the painter of Britain's most popular work of art. More than a million prints and posters have been sold of his work The Singing Butler since the original was bought for just over £4,500 in 1991. It shows a glamorous couple dancing on the beach while a maid and butler hold umbrellas over their heads to shield them from the rain. The original is due to go under the hammer, once again, in April and this time is expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds. Vettriano has enjoyed painting since he was in his 20s after a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolours. But he did not devote himself full time to art until the late 1980s when he was nearly 40. Since then, his rise has been meteoric and the public have clamoured both for his romantic, nostalgic views of a world gone by and for his far darker works that depict the sexual tensions between men and women.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a painter. You won't see his work in public galleries, but you will find it in shops all along the high street in framed prints, posters, coasters, on greeting cards, even biscuit tins. His romantic images of men and women from an era that feels
0:46.2	close but is still distant, are the most popular in Britain today. Born in Scotland, the
0:51.8	son of a coal miner, he taught himself to paint copying the works of the
0:55.9	great masters. At the age of 37, he submitted two pictures to the Royal Scottish Academy's
1:01.2	summer exhibition. They sold within 15 minutes and his life
1:05.4	changed forever. The fact that the critics don't care for him doesn't worry him too much.
1:10.9	I'd rather my painting sold to ordinary people, he says, than be stacked in a storehouse in the National Gallery.
1:17.0	He is Jack Vetriano. And just in case Jack, anyone listening
1:25.0	to think they don't know your work. We know that they did. Just help me explain it to him. It's the singing butler, it's the beach, it's the couple in evening dress.
1:29.0	It's the umbrellas.
1:30.0	Yeah, often when socially, people will say to me, and what do you do and I say, well I paint and they say,
1:36.2	what's your name and I say Jack Vertrion when they say, no, I don't know your work.
1:40.4	And I say, you know the butler with the umbrellarel on the beach and oh yes oh right oh you're him
1:46.1	I thought he was dead but it is the biggest selling print in Britain well that's what they tell me
1:52.3	and the original is about to go up for auction.
1:54.8	It is, yes. They say it's going to fetch 200,000? Do we believe this?
1:58.3	Well, that's the estimate of the Senate. I suspect it may go for more. Some women will say to her wealthy
2:05.4	husband, look I must have this. Well two women will do that and there'll be a dog
2:08.8	fighting the sailroom. That's what I feel will happen. Do you stand to gain
2:12.4	because it's not yours? No I stand nothing to gain. what I'm
	...

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