Monet's Poppy Fields - Jack Vettriano (1951 - )
REF: 5048
Medium - Oil on canvas board
Size - 11½" x 14" (29cm x 36cm)
Recto - Signed “Hoggan”
PROVENANCE
Bonhams Scotland and the Portland Art Gallery.
Jack Vettriano’s Poppy Fields is probably his most famous artwork after The Singing Butler. Read any article on Vettriano and you will always hear mention of his first painting being a “Copy” of Claude Monet’s Poppy Fields.
Jack Vettriano was talking about his life and work at The Cheltenham Literary Festival in October 2004. Vettriano was asked, when did it occur to him to start painting? To which he replied:
"It didn't actually occur to me, it occurred to a girl I was seeing when I was 21 after she saw some drawings I'd done. She got me a box of paints and told me I should try and colour those [drawings] in! Later I thought 'right, I'm going to be a real artist' and I went out and bought one of those boxes with six tubes of paint, three brushes, a palette to work on, and I taught myself.
I went to the local library and there wasn't a lot [of art books] there - just a few impressionists and some of the Italian masters. I just decided that the only real way was to just copy what was done [in those books]. I started off with Monet's Poppy Fields."
Jack Vettriano’s reimagining of Monet’s Poppy Fields was originally in the possession of his former wife. Vettriano’s wife gave the painting to a friend, long before Vettriano was well known and the painting was subsequently kept underneath the friend’s “sofa”. The painting came onto the open market in 2005, after The Singing Butler’s record sale’s amount of three quarters of a million pounds hit the headlines, when the friend realised that the painting may have some value.
The sale of the painting will be accompanied by a letter from Bonhams Scotland confirming the authenticity and provenance of the painting.
Condition – Excellent. Light paint restoration in small isolated areas.
