A painting sold for €1.1m may have been drawn from an artist's manual, but it's not the first time artists have taken short cuts, writes Shane Hegarty
The schadenfreude was thicker than oil paint in the art world this week. For years, critics have been saying that Scottish artist Jack Vettriano is little more than a purveyor of biscuit tin illustrations and tacky erotica. Yet, his painting The Singing Butler has become one of the biggest-selling prints in Europe. That popularity has brought him almost as much ridicule as it has cash. "He's not even an artist," insisted the Guardian's art critic, who proceeded to dismiss his work as "toneless, textureless, brainless, slick corpses of paintings".
Now, it seems, the critics have been handed their proof. It has been revealed that the central figures in The Singing Butler - in which a couple dances on a beach while a maid and butler shelter them with umbrellas - bear a remarkable resemblance to dancers pictured in an artist's self-help book, The Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual. In fact, they are almost identical to the dancers Vettriano depicts in several other paintings.
The artist has since defended himself by saying that he was always open about using guides because he couldn't afford to hire models, but he denies "copying" anything. Nonetheless, the story triggered a host of DIY experiments in the press this week. The Guardian asked a painting class to paint the dancers with the help of the book; the Daily Mail challenged three writers to have a go; and the Daily Record gave brushes and the manual to a five-year-old, who took 90 minutes to produce her copy.
In 2004, The Singing Butler sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for almost £750,000 (€1.1 million), although even that was tainted by unsubstantiated suggestions that the price might have been artificially inflated by a consortium keen to increase the value of Vettriano's paintings. It wasn't a bad return, given that the reference manual cost £16.99 in 1987, the year in which Vettriano took up painting.
"This seems to be a slightly embarrassing revelation in some ways, but the general principle is not unusual at all," says Dr Philip McEvansoneya of the History of Art department, Trinity College, Dublin. "It might be slightly surprising to find that it's been done from such an elementary source as a painting manual, but that would logically be something an artist would have to hand anyway. But the idea of referring to other people and borrowing ideas in their entirety or recycling them or making some use of them is by no means an unusual thing in the history of art."
Artists have often been accused of taking short-cuts. In 2001, a book by British artist David Hockney claimed that some of the greatest painters, including Van Eyck and Caravaggio, used lenses and a camera obscura to trace images. For instance, he argued, the chandelier in Van Eyck's famous Arnolfini Portrait is too perfect in its perspective to have been done without a concave mirror and a pencil. Some scientists have since challenged his theory, but Hockney is not alone in suggesting that artists would use primitive etch-a-sketches. There have been similar recent claims that Vermeer relied on a primitive lens to paint with such detail.
More recently, Roy Lichtenstein's most famous and influential works, the enlarged comic panels, were almost exact copies of drawings by far lesser known comic book artists now generally forgotten.
The history of art is also filled with examples of artists signing off on work that is not all theirs. Rembrandt's workshop cranked out many paintings, some of which were largely the work of assistants, although the master's touch would be applied. Andy Warhol's Factory was a production line for his art. Damien Hirst is well known for his dots, but many of them have been filled in by assistants.
"In the past many artists had assistants, but that was an accepted part of the procedure," says Dr McEvansoneya. "You knew that if you bought a certain work with an artist as the acknowledged author that what you were really buying was the collaborative product of a workshop that had been initiated and overseen and maybe finished off at the end by the master himself, but a number of hands of different levels of competence may have worked on it while it was in production." The contract with the buyer would often stipulate just how much of the master's touch would be applied to the work.
Vettriano can at least claim that the work is all by his own hand. Meanwhile, his defenders argue that regardless of where the figures came from, it is the emotion and narrative he gives to them which makes them so special.
"I can understand why some critics are auto-prejudiced against him, because he works so successfully in an old-fashioned and limited idiom. But, having said that, they're exactly the features which appeal to all sorts of people," says Dr McEvansenoya. "People might be sniffy because he's so successful outside the ordinary art world set-up."
Vettriano's detractors are likely to remain unimpressed, most notably when it comes to his many paintings of sexual encounters between scantily-clad women and be-suited men. For Vettriano himself it may be just his latest battle with snobbery among the art world. "Moral purpose?" he has said. "Why should I think about that? I taught myself to paint, remember, and that had nothing to do with moral purpose. When I look at a painting - anyone's painting - I like to see some craftsmanship. I like to see some skill or I feel cheated."