Jack Vettriano's Exhibitions: A Career in Retrospect
Jack Vettriano died in March 2025, closing a career that ran for over three decades and took him from a first solo show in Edinburgh to a national retrospective that drew more than 130,000 visitors. With no more paintings and no more exhibitions to come, it's worth looking back at the shows that built his reputation — and the catalogues, essays and reviews that documented them along the way.
A Fast Start (1992–1995)
Vettriano's rise was unusually quick. His first solo exhibition, Tales of Love and Other Stories, opened at The Edinburgh Gallery in May 1992 with 36 paintings. Just five months later he made his London debut with God's Children at the Mall Galleries, a show that included The Singing Butler — the painting that would go on to define his public reputation more than any other. Fallen Angels followed at Catto Gallery in 1993, then Summers Remembered at the Corrymella Scott Gallery later that year, and A Date with Fate, staged in a townhouse on Edinburgh's Heriot Row during the 1995 Festival and opened by Sir Tim Rice.
The Portland Gallery Years (1994–2004)
For a decade, Portland Gallery in London was Vettriano's main platform. Chimes at Midnight (1994), introduced in its catalogue by the critic W. Gordon Smith, was followed by The Passion and the Pain (1996), Between Darkness and Dawn (1998, which later travelled to Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery), Lovers and Other Strangers (2000, published as a book by Pavilion Books), and Affairs of the Heart (2004), whose catalogue was written by Portland Gallery's own director, Tom Hewlett. Many of the paintings that later became his best-known limited edition prints — Dancer for Money, The Billy Boys, Baby Bye Bye and Pincer Movement among them — were first shown in these exhibitions.
A Change of Scene (2006–2011)
The mid-2000s took Vettriano's work in a different direction, reflecting time spent on the French Riviera and in Monaco. Love, Devotion and Surrender (2006) drew on that period directly, and Homage à Tuiga (2009), staged at the Yacht Club de Monaco, marked the centenary of the historic racing yacht Tuiga. Days of Wine and Roses opened at Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery in March 2010 before travelling to Heartbreak Publishing's London gallery that autumn, and The Ballroom Spy (2011) paired his paintings with photography by Jeanette Jones.
Jack Vettriano: A Retrospective (2013–2014)
His first, and only, major retrospective opened at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow in September 2013 and ran until February 2014. More than 100 paintings were brought together from private collections around the world, several shown in public for the first time in nearly 20 years. It went on to become the most successful commercial exhibition Glasgow has ever staged, drawing over 136,000 visitors. The accompanying book, with contributions from novelist A.L. Kennedy, journalist Tom Rawstorne and W. Gordon Smith, remains the single most comprehensive published account of his career.
Coming Home: The Early Years (2022)
Vettriano's final major exhibition brought his story full circle. Jack Vettriano: The Early Years opened at Kirkcaldy Galleries — in his home town — in June 2022, after a two-year delay, and focused on rarely-seen early work, including pieces signed with his birth name, Jack Hoggan, from before he became a full-time artist.
A Body of Work Now Complete
Jack Vettriano died in March 2025. That makes every exhibition above part of a closed, finished record rather than an ongoing career — there will be no new painting, no new show and no new catalogue to add to this list. What's left is the body of work itself: the paintings these exhibitions introduced to the public, many of which are now available as the signed limited edition prints in our collection, each one part of the story above.
Browse our full collection of signed limited edition Jack Vettriano prints, many of them the very paintings first shown in the exhibitions above.
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