More than money in the bank however public demand is balm on his

More than money in the bank, however, public demand is balm on his wounds.Only a few miles of water separate Edinburgh from Fife, but in that expanse a cultural chasm yawns between the capital’s cultural elite and the mining- turned-factory working classes from which Vettriano springs. “I think it’s nice and god-awful at the same time,” he says, though he admits he has no plans to curtail the poster sales, not least because they are reported to bring him at least pounds 150,000 a year in royalties. More than 400 private buyers are waiting to purchase an original, and The Singing Butler was recently sold for pounds 33,000.Still, Vettriano seems less comfortable with his rampant commercial success than Hewlitt. While Vettriano’s fame rests largely on less explicit, postcard-friendly images, it is work like this that attracts private buyers such as Robbie Coltrane, Terence Conran and Tim Rice.The artist’s agent, Tom Hewlitt of London’s Portland Gallery, says there is no sign that sales of Vettriano posters and cards are bringing down the value of originals. It was dubbed the sexiest work at this year’s London Contemporary Art Fair and sold for pounds 15,000. Don’t think it doesn’t haunt me.”I’ve just been reading Lowry’s life story, and about how he took friends’ advice not to go down the commercial path. But why shouldn’t someone with only pounds 20 to spend be allowed to have an image of mine in their living- room?”On his own living-room wall hangs a Vettriano original called Game On, in which a man in braces pins a woman in black underwear and silk stockings against the wall with one hand, while the other dips between her parted legs.

“I can’t complain that The Singing Butler is the best-selling poster in Britain,” he says, in a surprisingly soft voice “But at the same time I can’t bear to see it too often. His own manner has a little of the sexy seediness of his canvas characters. Does that make him ambivalent about his success? And does he not worry that the sheer ubiquity of his work may undermine demand for the original paintings?Vettriano lights the latest in a never-ending chain of high-tar cigarettes and looks around a room as deliberately mannered as one of his paintings. These works are understandably deemed too racy for the poster circuit.Meanwhile, the public’s apparently insatiable demand for his work seems only to have convinced critics that whatever it is that Vettriano produces, it is not “high art”.

At 45, there is nothing now of the miner about Vettriano, whose paintings have made him a millionaire in less than a decade. But then he was never romantic about his working-class roots and, in particular, the five years he spent underground after leaving school at 16, “to become a man, just like my father”.
To critics who ask why he doesn’t draw on the hard reality of the pits, he says bitterly that if they had been there in the grime, they would understand the escapist allure of his paintings – two of which, Mad Dogs and The Singing Butler, have gone on to become the UK’s best-selling posters, dwarfing the sales of other less well- regarded artists, such as Monet and Van Gogh.Settling into an armchair in his sumptuously decorated period-drawing- room-cum-temporary-studio (a new studio is being built above the garage that will house his collection of classic cars), the man who was raised in a miner’s row in Methil, one of Fife’s grimmer seaside towns, clearly feels that critical understanding of his work has lamentably been lacking.For despite his phenomenal popularity, not only with the masses but also with movie stars such as Jack Nicholson (who owns four Vettrianos) and private collectors, Scotland’s highbrow commentators, with very few exceptions, dismiss Vettriano’s work as “rich man’s soft porn”.Complaints about the pornographic nature of Vettriano’s work centre on the raw sexual canvases – the bulk of his output – in which men are invariably wolfish (it seems fitting that Nicholson is a fan) and the females red- lipped, hard-faced and vampish; as Vettriano puts it, “verging on the cheap”. As he moves, his lank, oiled hair, which frames an unexpectedly earnest face, bobs about his shoulders. He is currently “in hiding”, and he prefers to keep the address secret.

Jack Vettriano, former Fife miner, self-taught artist and, despite the derision of snooty critics, perhaps Britain’s most commercially successful painter, strides down the drive of his grand, recently purchased Scottish country pile. Giggs sat out Wednesday’s 2-0 win over Shanghai Shenhua with a thigh strain, while Solskjaer, who scored the first goal, suffered a knee injury.Carlton have appointed a Melbourne law firm, compensation specialists Slater and Gordon, to represent them as they consider legal action over Andy Cole’s tackle on their defender Simon Colosimo.Colosimo needs knee surgery following the United striker’s challenge during Sunday’s match between Australia and United in Sydney The Australian international could be out for six months.. Five Malaysian players were injured and two were taken to hospital after being punched and kicked by fans during a pitch invasion.Ryan Giggs and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will miss the game because they have flown home after picking up injuries. The German international put pen to paper at Anfield yesterday afternoon.Manchester United players will have bodyguards for the final match of their Asian tour, against South China in Hong Kong tomorrow.The authorities are deploying hundreds of extra police at the Hong Kong Stadium to avoid a repeat of the riot during a recent Olympic qualifier at the ground between Nepal and Malaysia. On the question of whether there was any chance of Goldberg remaining at the club, he said, “Whoever comes in will make up their own minds who will be on the board of directors.”Dietmar Hamann has completed his move to Liverpool from Newcastle for a fee believed to be pounds 8m. The club’s chairman, Mark Goldberg, who has personal debts of pounds 30m and faces potential bankruptcy a week on Monday when he faces a showdown with his own creditors, has consistently said that he would like to maintain control of the club.His father-in-law, Les Hapgood, a Bromley-based businessman, has been linked with a bid for Palace, but Paterson said yesterday that he was not aware that Hapgood was involved.”As far as I am aware, these people [the City consortium] are their own people, and have not had any previous involvement with Crystal Palace,” Paterson said. Palace’s former owner Ron Noades still owns the ground and would not be prepared to deal with such bidders.The other bid, which is headed by Palace director Simon Hume-Kendall and has Noades’ support “is not as good as the City bid in what it offers to the creditors,” Paterson said.

“We have found a bid that meets our criteria to take the club out of administration and we will take it from here.”Paterson’s company, Moore Stephens, has the responsibility of finding new owners for Palace. Two of the others, funded by a foreign merchant bank and a stadium management company respectively, were unsuitable, he said, because they were conditional on the new owners either buying Selhurst Park or negotiating a new lease on the ground. These are City people who have shown to me that they can invest an eight-figure sum, at least pounds 10m, into the club. They are interested in the club as an investment.”Palace currently have debts of pounds 20m but it is understood that pounds 10m would be sufficient to agree a partial payment of debts and to stabilise the club’s finances.Paterson added that the City consortium’s bid was one of four he had been considering.