IT WAS the moment when the "people's painter" met his match in the Royal riding champion.
Jack Vettriano's painting of Zara Phillips shows her reclining on a chair draped in a Union Flag – but she refused to wear her jodhpurs
Former Fife miner Jack Vettriano, whose artworks please the punters but make art connoisseurs cringe, is not normally caught painting Royal portraits.
But when asked to paint an athlete for the BBC's charity programme Sport Relief, he told organisers he would make an exception for Zara Phillips.
He was astonished when the Queen's grand-daughter obliged – although she refused to be painted in her jodhpurs.
Six months later, the resulting portrait is insured for about £100,000, and could take Vettriano's career to a new level.
"I am not a portrait painter and I don't particularly find female athletes to be attractive. I kind of thought, 'Well I probably won't do this'," said Vettriano. But he told the organisers that "if I was asked to paint Zara Phillips I couldn't resist".
Images by six artists of three sporting heroes go under the hammer for Sport Relief this spring. The godfather of pop art Sir Peter Blake and political caricaturist Gerald Scarfe are each taking on the face of boxer Ricky Hatton.
Didier Drogba, the Chelsea footballer from Côte d'Ivoire, will be captured by art wild-child Stella Vine and cricketer-turned-painter Jack Russell.
Phillips, an Olympic riding champion and a BBC Sports Personality of the Year, volunteered for Vettriano.
Vettriano, who works from photographs, first went to meet Phillips at her mother the Princess Royal's estate at Gatcombe Park.
Typically outspoken, he confessed to her that he had always found her riding jodhpurs "very sexy".
"I said, 'I would love to paint you in jodhpurs and stuff'. She said, 'No, that's how everybody wants to see me'. She said she wasn't comfortable with it.
"Normally, I have the whip hand. I invite models to my studio and I say what they wear and what they do and here I was being told that certain things weren't on. It kind of confused me a little."
Carl Doran, the editor of Sport Relief at the BBC who persuaded Phillips to come on board, said: "I think the painting is sensational. The reaction among the people who've seen it is extraordinary. Zara was very keen to do it. We had promised it would someone of a very high calibre and you can't get better than Jack – it was a perfect match."
Sport Relief Weekend takes place on 14-16 March. A two-part documentary about the paintings, Sport Portraits, will be broadcast the preceding week on BBC1. The works will be auctioned later this year.
However, Vettriano said the photoshoot for the painting did not go well, on an overcast day in Gatcombe.
"I knew the photographs would be rubbish, and they were, so we had to persuade her to come into my studio."
He used a Union Flag to underline the Royal connection and, as with many of his other works, chose a title – The Olympian – that was vague about the object's identity.
"My original idea was she would be standing with the Union Jack behind her, but while she was here, I said, 'Let's drape the flag over the chair and sit down'. She said, 'I've got new shoes that you might like'. I said, 'Hmmm, you've clearly heard about my shoe fetish'. She likes a laugh, she's really up for a joke, and very quickly you could tell you could have fun with her.
"As soon as I looked through the lens I said, 'Yes, that's what I'm going to paint'."
The difficulties continued, however. Vettriano got up at 4am to paint the first portrait for a filming deadline, but decided his effort was "bloody rubbish", threw it out and started again from scratch.
"It is not funny doing portrait commissions – you are haunted that you will not do it right, and you will not do the job, and folk will feel you've let them down.
"The photo turned out well, and I got it done, and I took it up to her father's place last week and let her see it, and she loved it. If she doesn't love it, she's a very good actress.
"For me, that was the person I most wanted to please. The next thing is to get as much as possible at auction. I've put in a lot of my hours in this. It's for charity."
MORE NEW WORK: A BOOKJACK Vettriano is in Edinburgh in two weeks to promote his new book, Studio Life. It looks at the painter's life on a day-to-day basis, with a foreword by Ian Rankin.
His last major exhibition was 18 months ago, and he has no plans for another one.
Despite commercial popularity, Vettriano has failed to receive critical acceptance. His most popular work, The Singing Butler, sold at auction for £744,500 in 2004, while last year a series of his paintings sold for more than £1 million, the most expensive of which, Bluebird at Bonneville, fetched £468,000.
The full article contains 841 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
