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Jack Vettriano oil painting 100% handamde reproduction. Jack Vettriano OBE born Jack Hoggan (born 17 November 1951), is a Scottish painter. Vettriano’s breakthrough year was 1988, when he felt ready to display his paintings in public and submitted two canvases for the Royal Scottish Academy annual show. Both paintings sold on the first day and Vettriano was approached by several galleries who wanted to sell his other work. He moved to Edinburgh, changing his name to Vettriano, adding an “a” to his mother’s maiden name. Further successful exhibitions followed in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York. His paintings are reminiscent of the film noir genre, often with romantic or nude themes. His original paintings now regularly fetch six figure prices, but he is thought to make more money from the sale of reproductions. According to The Guardian, he earns £500,000 a year in print royalties. Each year a new set of limited edition prints are published, and his most popular work, The Singing Butler (which does not actually show a butler singing), sells more posters and postcards than any other artist in the UK. On 21 April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500 – in stark contrast to 1992 when Vettriano painted the picture and submitted it for inclusion in the Royal Academy summer show, only to be rejected. In November 1999, Vettriano’s work was shown for the first time in New York, when twenty-one paintings were displayed at The International 20th Century Arts Fair at The Armory. More than forty collectors from the UK flew out for the event and all twenty-one paintings were sold on the opening night to British collectors. In 1996, Sir Terence Conran commissioned Vettriano to create a series of paintings for his new Bluebird Club in London. The seven paintings inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm Campbell hung in the Club for ten years. Heartbreak Publishing, Vettriano’s publishing own company, is to produce a special Boxed Set featuring signed, limited edition prints of all seven paintings to mark the 75th anniversary of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s final World Land Speed Record. BLUEBIRD BOX SET The Bluebird paintings were put up for sale at Sotheby’s on 30 August 2007 and made more than £1m. The most expensive was Bluebird at Bonneville, bought for £468,000 at a Sotheby’s auction held at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire. This painting is considered the most iconic of the series commissioned by restaurateur Sir Terence Conran for the Bluebird Club. Vettriano has studios in Scotland and London. He was represented by the Portland Gallery, London from 1993 to 2007 and counts Jack Nicholson, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Tim Rice and Robbie Coltrane amongst his collectors.[1] To date, five books have been published about Jack Vettriano, the most recent of which is entitled ‘Studio Life’ and was published in March 2008. In 2008 Vettriano painted a portrait of Zara Phillips MBE (horse rider and granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II) as part of a charity fund-raising project for Sport Relief 2008. The painting is entitled ‘Olympia’ and it is to be auctioned later this year at a charity fund-raising auction along with works by Sir Peter Blake, Rankin, Gerald Scarfe and Stella Vine. All proceeds from the charity auction will go to will go to Sport Relief, an initiative of Comic Relief, a charity registered in England no. 326568. The portraits project was featured in a BBC programme Sport Portraits shown on March 10, 2008. In February 2009, Vettriano launched his own publishing company, Heartbreak Publishing, to publish and promote work by other artists and to distribute his own published works directly to his fans and collectors. Jack Vettriano’s most recent exhibition, ‘Days Of Wine And Roses’, was opened by First Minister, Alex Salmond, at the Kirkcaldy Museum in Fife, Scotland on 27 March 2010 and received more than 48,000 visitors during its five week run there. The exhibition is due to transfer to London in September. NEXT EXHIBITION INFORMATION On Wednesday 24 March 2010, Sir Jackie Stewart presented Vettriano with the Great Scot of the Year Award. The award ceremony was held at the Boisedale Club in London and other nominees included Kirsty Young, Sharleen Spiteri, Ian Rankin and Kenny Logan. The award prompted renewed calls for Vettriano’s work to be represented in the National Galleries of Scotland with MSP Ted Brocklebank filing a Motion in Parliament calling for Vettriano’s contribution to Scottish culture to be recognised.