🖼️ 🎨 🖼️
Addendum to review of Joe Tucker’s The Secret Painter (2025, Cannongate Books, Edinburgh, Sctld) – see:
𖤓 𖤓 𖤓
Reading The Secret Painter we learn that the late Eric Tucker, an unskilled manual labourer by day and “unseen” painter by night, wanted to go to art school—nephew Joe recounts how Eric expressed a wish to study at St Ives (School of Painting)—although typically with Eric, we get a sense of ambivalence in him as to whether he actually did want to go after all.
Nonetheless, if it was the case it remained an unfulfilled ambition for Eric, he missed the opportunity (or was denied it by his impoverished working class background) to get formal training at an art college. However, it would be wrong to assume that Eric never acquired an art education. As Joe Tucker explains: “He had to figure out for himself, from scratch, what was art, (and) what was good art…his self–education in art was lifelong”.
Tucker was a voracious consumer of art books in the small Padmore (Warrington) terraced house that was his home for most of his 86 years. This introduced him to classic modern masters, and Eric’s paintings show the influences – Impressionists (there’s a nod to the proto–Impressionist Cézanne in Eric’s version of ‘The Card Players’), Van Gogh, Chagall and the old masters like Rembrandt. When he wasn’t working or covertly painting, Eric would take himself off to Manchester on Saturdays, spending hours studying the works on public display in the Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth. The art of the 19th century Pre–Raphaelites, especially Ford Madox Brown, was another strong influence on Eric.
And there was the work of LS Lowry…many observers have been quick to liken the Mancunian‘s paintings to Tucker’s, both northerners focusing exclusively on the same subject matter (working class life in the industrial Northwest). But there is a caveat here, Lowry’s paintings don’t have the eye for character and detailed portraiture that is the mainstay of Tucker’s art¹.
A heavier imprint on Tucker’s development as an artist seems to lie with Edward Burra and Paul Hampson…Burra is thought to be to have been Eric’s favourite artist, or one of them. Tucker, like Burra before him, set himself the mission of representing working class life in an non–sentimentalised manner (people talking, drinking, smoking and singing in pubs and bars, street activities, circuses, etc.)
Similarly, we get echoes of Roger Hampson in Tucker’s paintings, especially in Hampson’s colliery paintings, evoking the same feel of gritty social realism – compare Hampson’s ‘Two Miners’ with Tucker’s ‘Portrait of a Coal Miner’.
And of course, we can’t neglect the most profound source of inspiration for the “secret painter” – the ordinary workers and their families of Warrington that Eric mingled with, they were his (unsuspecting) models for the images of a world he knew intimately.
¹ Eric’s younger brother Tony makes this differentiation between the two painters: “Lowry is the outsider looking in and my brother is the insider looking out. My brother is one of the people in the pictures, he knows them all”
Eric Tucker ~ from unseen, anonymous painter to posthumous UK art world celebrity