Craigie Aitchison

Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009)

Craigie Aitchison was born in Edinburgh in 1926. He studied jurisprudence and British history at Edinburgh University (1944–46) and began training for the bar at Middle Temple, London, in 1948. But in 1950, he changed his career and returned to Edinburgh to practice painting before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (1952–54). In 1955, the British Council awarded him a two-month travelling scholarship and he travelled to Italy. His experiences there had a profound influence on his work. His first solo exhibition was held at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1959, and significant retrospectives of his work were held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow in 1996 and the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2003. In 1994 he won the first ever Jerwood Painting Prize and was awarded the Nordstern Art Prize in 2000. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Art in 1978 and as an academician in 1988, and he was made a CBE in 1999. He died in 2009.

Aitchison painted a wide range of subjects that included still life, landscape, the nude, portraiture, dogs, and, most idiosyncratic of all, crucifixions. He treated them all with a distinctive style of cleanly outlined forms constructed from luminous colour. Examples of Aitchison's religious paintings include a depiction of calvary (1996–98) commissioned by Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Aitchison also collaborated with Glyndebourne Opera House where he decorated the Gallery Stalls in 2005 and produced various programme covers and prints alongside contributors such as David Hockney, Mary Fedden and Sir Hugh Casson.