Jack Vettriano, OBE was born in St Andrews in Scotland in 1951 and grew up in the industrial seaside town of Methil, about 30 minutes south of his birthplace. Born Jack Hoggan, later adopting his mother's maiden name, Vettriano left school at 16 and became an apprentice mining engineer. For a short time in the late 1960s, he had a summer job as a bingo caller at the Beachcomber Amusements arcade on Leven Promenade.

Vettriano took up painting as a hobby in the 1970s, when a girlfriend bought him a set of artist's paints for his 21st birthday. His earliest paintings, under his birth name "Jack Hoggan", were copies or pastiches of impressionist paintings; his first painting was a copy of Claude Monet's Poppy Fields. Much of Jack Vettriano's influence came from studying paintings at the Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery.

Jack Vettriano's 1992 painting "The Singing Butler" became a best-selling image in Britain in 2004 when it sold at auction for £744,800, a record at the time for any Scottish painting, and for any painting ever sold in Scotland.