I figured out secret of The Singing Butler
MOMENT OF FRAME Designer confesses to artist that he uncovered the £16.99 manual which inspired his masterpiece ..but Vettriano shrugs it off and buys him a pint
A SCOTS designer who exposed controversial artist Jack Vettriano for copying some of his best known figures from a picture manual has shared a pint with the painter.
Sandy Robb bumped into the Fife-born painter in the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh, a haunt for artists and authors including Ian Rankin.
The 61-year-old told Vettriano it was he who had revealed his secret – but the men parted on good terms after posing for a picture together.
The meeting came a decade after the Record exposed the true inspiration behind Vettriano’s most lucrative works, including The Singing Butler.
Sandy said at the time he had stumbled across remarkably similar drawings in the Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual. Sandy said: “Vettriano moved into a flat quite near the Oxford Bar and that’s where I met him. We had a drink and I told him I was the guy who went to the papers. “He was quite shocked. We got on all right after. I don’t think he’s got a grudge against me. “I met him in the streets a couple of weeks before that and he admitted to using the images from the book but the composition that he created was his and I agreed with him.
“He’s quite a decent guy really. He had his arm broken at the time and I think he was a bit down in the dumps.”
In 2005, Sandy had been asked by a pal to design some invitations and decided to do a spoof of Vettriano’s work.
In a bid to find similar dancing figures to those in the artist’s most iconic piece, The Singing Butler, Sandy turned to the manual for inspiration.
He said his “jaw dropped” when he saw the similarities before realising many of the figures were almost identical.
He said: “I still have the manual I used to copy him. The funny thing is I was doing a kind of spoof of Vettriano and looking in the book for images like the dancers. I found the ones he used. I found all the other figures in The Singing Butler and another three pictures of his had images from the book as well.
“I was in the same boat as him kind of thing, using the book the same way as he did.”
The manual, which cost £16.99 in 1987, was filled with photos posed by models which could be copied. It was often used by graphic designers.
Some of the figures bear a striking resemblance to those in Vettriano’s works, with some only slightly adapted.
His picture, The Singing Butler, which sold for a Scottish record £750,000, has just been voted the UK’s third favourite work of art.