Painting the picture of John Houston, the footballing artist

They say every picture tells a story. However, those sold at an auction this week in Edinburgh with the late John Houston's signature etched in the corner did not yield too much in the way of information about the artist's former life as a footballer, and a very promising one at that.

• John Houston in2007, at the hanging of one of his exhibitions in Edinburgh

His recruitment by Dundee United in the early Fifties is evidence of this. There is also the matter of a Scotland Under-21 cap, something noted in nearly all of his obituaries.

"Autumn sunset, near Elie" and "Towards the Bass Rock", the Firth of Forth feature which was a recurring motif in his work, are the titles of two paintings which commanded high prices this week at Bonhams, the Edinburgh auction house. They offer a clue as to Houston's roots. Although Fife in the 1930s was not, perhaps, a natural breeding ground for painters, it was a fertile place for footballers. Houston's cultured left foot pre-dated that of Jim Baxter's, born nine years later in Hill of Beath.

Houston, who had he not died in 2008 would have turned 80 this year, was one of the foremost artists of his time in Britain. As Duncan MacMillan wrote in The Scotsman, "the scale and grandeur of Munch and Turner are often echoed in his work". He was married for over 50 years to Elizabeth Blackadder, herself an eminent Scottish painter. Together they were known as Scotland's first couple of art.

However, while Houston's talent as an artist had been recognised at Buckhaven High School, his left foot was once thought more likely to bring him fame and fortune. Being considered one of Fife's great talents in the 1940s usually meant only one thing - you were destined to end up on the books of Bayview Youth Club, feeder club to East Fife. The side had been set up by the club's Scottish Cup-winning manager Davie McLean and hoovered up the young talents in the area. According to Bill Dunn, a childhood friend and team-mate at Bayview, Houston was always reckoned to be one of them. Before Bayview, the pair had been spotted by Raith Athletic. All roads led to East Fife. The Bayview side were not just the fashionable club in Fife, but also Scotland.

"John was a couple of years older than me," says Dunn, who turns 80 in July next year. "John went very quickly from Raith Athletic to Bayview because of his prowess. Bayview Youth club had a good scouting system for a youth side and had the pick of the talent in this area. Everybody wanted to play for Bayview Youth Club."

Everyone also wanted to go on and play for East Fife. However, it was impossible to satisfy all the youngsters' ambitions. Some did, obviously. Incredibly, Gordon Easson made his debut when he was thrown into the first team for the Scottish Cup final against Rangers in 1950, conceding a goal inside 30 seconds in front of 130,000 people. Others, inevitably, slipped through the net. Houston, an East Fife fan, was one of those. He spent one season at Dundee United, where a knee ligament injury saw one door close and another open. He was already studying at the Edinburgh College of Art. "I suppose it was an oversight," reflects Dunn, who was himself allowed to leave, later to emerge again as one of Forfar Athletic's finest strikers of the post-war era.

Houston's football career had come to an end by the time Dunn returned from national service, spent in the air force. He didn't play a senior game for United, although it's clear he was being primed for a role. In a match programme for a ‘C' Division game against Hibs at Easter Road on 6 October, 1951, the "young Johnny Houston" is described as adding "a touch of class to a sweet moving quintet".

As for Houston, recognition would come from his achievements on canvas. In 1963 he shared the Guthrie Award, the Royal Scottish Academy's highest award for painting. In 1990 he was awarded an OBE for his services to art. But there is the mystery of the Scotland appearance, described in one of his own retrospectives as being for the Scotland Under-21s in 1949, against England. Richard McBrearty, the curator of the Scottish Football museum, confirms that the Scotland Under-21 side only came into existence in the mid-1970s, while the idea for the Under-23 team pre-dating it was conceived in the early 1950s. "It's likely he played for a representative team of some sort - perhaps an amateur select," he says.

"I lost track of him," Dunn laments. "The last time I saw John was at Waverley station, in 1956. I had been down to Berwick playing for Forfar. I got the train up to Waverley before heading home to Fife, and it was when I was changing trains. John happened to alight from a taxi. Of course we had a chat there, but that was the last time."

Dunn did organise a Bayview Youth Club reunion, held at East Fife's new headquarters at New Bayview. "I didn't contact John because by this time he was in the upper echelons of the art world and I thought: ‘well I don't suppose John will fancy coming, to be in the company of the old players. But I heard later on that he had heard we had the reunion and he was quite disappointed not to be there."

One other question does have to be asked. The nickname. To his artist contemporaries, he was a serious, often undemonstrative painter. To his old school and football pals, he was always ‘Pussy'. Why? "I was afraid you might ask that," sighs Dunn. The explanation is not an unseemly one, however, and involves nothing less innocent than games of ‘pussy in the middle' in the back garden of Houston's childhood home in Windygates.

Destiny decreed that Houston should go on to marry a painter whose depiction of cats was one of her own central motifs. The hand of fate, however, would not allow Houston to colour in his own early promise as a footballer.