Craigie Aitchison was born in Edinburgh in 1926. He started training to become a lawyer but abandoned this career and entered the Slade School of Art in 1952. Aitchison’s work was first shown in a group show at Gimpel Fils in 1954, and his first one man show was at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1959. Since then he has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom, and overseas in locations as diverse as Tokyo (1969), Delhi (1984) and Jerusalem (1992). In 1953, during his second year at the Slade, he won the prize for the best still life and two years later he was awarded the British Council Italian Government Scholarship to Rome. In the intervening years he has received many awards, including the Jerwood Prize in 1994. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow in 1996. In 1998 he completed a commission for Liverpool Cathedral. Recent exhibitions were held at The Museum of Modern Art, Powys (2001) and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2003).