Peter Doig (born in Edinburgh in 1959) is a British painter widely regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation. His work, centred mainly on landscape, draws on personal memories and photographs, although it does not follow a photorealist style.
He spent his childhood in Trinidad and Canada, where his family moved in 1966. After returning to Britain in 1979, he studied at Wimbledon, Saint Martin's and Chelsea School of Art, where he gained an MA. Shortly after graduating he won the Whitechapel prize, which led to a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1991.
His snowscapes and ski scenes recall his youth in Canada, while other canvases draw on life in Trinidad. In the early 1990s he worked on modernist buildings, such as The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991), which shows Eberhard Zeidler's house in the Rosedale ravine in central Toronto. His painting draws on very varied sources, from photographs and record covers to films, and on earlier masters such as Munch, Monet and Klimt.
In 2002 he returned to Trinidad, where he set up a studio near Port of Spain, and he taught as a professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf until 2017. His first major exhibition in his home country, No Foreign Lands, was held at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.
His market success has been remarkable. In 2007, White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. The curator Paul Schimmel later remarked that the sale had turned him into a symbol of the excesses of the market. His legacy rests above all on a landscape painting that blends memory, architecture and popular culture.