By no means just a “Sunday painter”: The Secret Painter is Joe Tucker’s memoir about his favourite uncle – Eric Tucker, a lifelong bachelor, proudly working class, a man who worked at manual labouring jobs all his life, ordinary and yet at the same time unconventional and exceptional. Beneath the surface however Eric was harbouring a big secret. He was also an artist flying completely under the radar…for six decades up to his death in 2018 Eric prolifically churned out painting after painting, focusing on the everyday scenes of working class life in Warrington and the Northwest of England, including detailed portraits of locals. His immediate family including Joe were only vaguely aware of this, other side of “Our Eric’s” life and had no inkling of the scale of his artistic pursuits.
⇑ ‘Pub Scene’ (Eric Tucker)
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Tidying up the shambolic clutter of Eric’s small council house after his funeral Joe, his father and aunt unearthed some 540 or so paintings by Eric that he had stashed in numerous nooks and crannies of the terrace house. It was a complete revelation…(Joe reflected) ”what I’d thought of as maybe a pastime—inasmuch as I’d thought about it at all—I realised was the centre of his life, at the core of who he was”.
‘The Card Players’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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In The Secret Painter¹ nephew Joe slowly pieces together aspects of his enigmatic uncle’s life, including the trials and tribulations of living with a man seen by some as a bit of an oddball², so set in his own frustratingly idiosyncratic ways that he stubbornly refused to embrace change of any sort. Eric’s work “career” was one of drifting from job to job – builder’s labourer, gravedigger, pro boxer (briefly), etc. Out of this undistinguished CV Eric made himself without any formal art training into a serious and accomplished painter and consummate sketcher³.
⇑ ‘Horses’ (Eric Tucker)
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Raising a flag on behalf of the arts in Warrington: While Joe’s reasons for writing the memoir were motivated by a desire to bestow on his uncle the recognition of his artistic achievements that he richly deserved, he had a secondary mission in the book – to refute the widespread assumption that Warrington was bereft of anything culturally worthwhile (aside perhaps from the local Warrington Wolves rugby league club). Warrington has long been the butt of many jokes throughout the country, stigmatised as a cultural desert…in fact the verdict was official, in 2015 the town was voted “Worst Place for Culture in Britain!” Joe’s book about the unknown artist in his family provides a heartfelt disavowal of these complacent assumptions and prejudices from outsiders about his home town.
‘The Ragtatter’s Horse’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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“Our Eric’s” secret calling: Considering the mountain of paintings and drawings completed by Tucker over six decades, it’s astounding that his family knew so little about his artistic pastime. But Eric was deeply distrustful by nature, and resistant to revealing anything about his hidden activities with paintbrush and canvas, especially to outsiders⁴. Eric had made no effort to promote his art⁵, though almost at the end of his life he relented a bit and expressed a wish to have an exhibition of his paintings in Warrington after his death. It’s a testimony to Joe Tucker and his father Tony (Eric’s younger brother) that the family managed to sort through the farrago of a house, collect and catalogue all the paintings and then arrange for that public exhibition that he had wished for. The efforts that Eric’s relatives went to to make the posthumous exhibition happen was nigh on Herculean and we can sense just how important it was to Joe that they, as he put it, “crack the supposedly cliquish art world”. You get the feeling that Joe, beyond any filial loyalties he may feel towards his uncle, genuinely believed in the importance of Eric’s artwork. By exposing Eric’s oeuvre of paintings to the world, they were documenting an entire working class culture and lifestyle that no longer exists.
‘Bar scene with man smoking’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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The two-day exhibition in Eric’s modest terrace house did go ahead and proved to be spectacularly successful beyond all expectations and from there the whole thing snowballed…a Warrington retrospective of Eric’s paintings, followed by exhibitions in that Mecca of London art galleries, Cork Street. Today, Eric’s paintings of working class Warrington life sell for up to £15,000 to £20,000 – not quite in the stratosphere of “Blue Poles” or “Sunflowers”, but figures that Eric, if he was still around, would dare not have dreamed possible.
‘Industrial Scene’ (LS Lowry) ⇑
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The “Secret Lowry”: The sudden rise from obscurity to art celebrity of Eric, a working man artist from Warrington, inevitably led the media to draw parallels with another celebrated delineator of the images of working class Lancashire, LS Lowry. The similarities are however superficial, Lowry (from a middle class background) focused mainly on industrial urban landscapes—typically distance vistas with humans drawn as anonymous, stylised figures (often matchstick people)—whereas Tucker created detailed images of working class people (his own people) in their typical milieus, pubs, streets, workplaces, engaging in entertainment, etc. As the Tucker exhibition’s curator Janice Hayes put it: “in Lowry, the characters are almost incidental. For Eric, you actually feel that you know some of these people” (“Eric Tucker: Exhibition fulfils ‘unseen’ artist’s final wish”, Ian Youngs, BBC News, 23–Nov–2019, www.bbc.com).
Schoolboy Joe Tucker with his uncle Eric (source: BBC World Service) ⇑
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Postscript: The sudden popularity of Eric’s paintings have generated an instant windfall, and it is likely to transform the late Warrington artist’s modest and even meagre estate at the time of his death into something very lucrative. So, an interesting side question to ponder might be, who are the beneficiaries of the solitary deceased bachelor?
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This vignette from the book conveys a sense of Eric’s customary quick and blunt wit, eg, on an overseas family cruise a mindreader, no doubt to his immediate regret, had the misfortune to choose Eric from the audience as part of his show, leading to the following exchange:
Mindreader: Where are you from?
Eric: You’re the bloody mindreader, you tell me!
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¹ described by The Telegraph (UK) as “an engaging blend of biographical sleuthing and personal memoir”
² Eric’s personality, the author infers, was a curious mix of the “solitary” and the “sociable”
³ ever mindful of keeping his artistic proclivities as unobtrusive as possible, Eric would seat himself in a good spot in pubs and working men’s clubs, quietly sipping a pint while he (surreptitiously) sketched the patrons
⁴ he was also suspicious of some of his own family members, often unreasonably so
⁵ just about the only exception to this was when Eric permitted a very low-key exhibition of his paintings in a Warrington pub in 1963
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For the influences shaping Tucker’s art see also: