Perhaps nothing captures the many paradoxes of Eric Tucker’s extraordinary life more succinctly than his choice of bookmark for all the art history books he secretly devoured. “Betting slips,” reveals his nephew Joe Tucker, with a grin. “They were falling out of his art books when we found them. They were everywhere.”
To the outsider, and also to most of his close family, Tucker was more generally a man of the bookies than of books: a chap who liked a daily bet and a pint of bitter; an unskilled labourer who had tried his hand at gravedigging and boxing; an unassuming grafter who lived all his life with his mother in a council terrace in Warrington, Cheshire, trying to make ends meet. He Sellotaped his broken car window and sometimes made do with rope to hold up his trousers.
Yet for Tucker – who left school at 14 after his dad was killed in the war, forcing his mum to find work, first as a domestic servant and then in a factory – art books were his inspiration, his source of information about the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Edward Burra. They nourished the largely hidden part of his life: painting.
While most were aware Tucker liked to sketch and paint, and even take the bus to visit Manchester’s art galleries, it was only less than a year before his death in 2018, aged 86, that Joe became aware of the sheer depth of his uncle’s passion and ambition, not to mention the dizzying volume of work he had produced throughout his life, almost completely under the radar.
Stacked throughout his terrace – under beds, in cupboards, in the garden shed and in the dilapidated air raid shelter – were some 550 oil paintings, plus watercolours and “maybe 1,000” sketches. The lion’s share were intimate renderings of his local streets and favourite pub interiors, capturing the regulars he supped with in all their ruddy, craggy glory, without saccharine or patronising sentiment.
This was Tucker’s working-class world: rag and bone men, factory workers and fusty bars, all arranged on canvas with a quality of composition and palette, as well as an intricate attention to humanity, that has impressed many critics. “I don’t know when he was doing it,” says Joe, 42, a screenwriter who has now written a book about his uncle, called The Secret Painter.
“His mother must have been aware, but no one ever spoke about it. We knew he had the front parlour and worked there, but we rarely went inside. I don’t remember ever seeing him paint. Occasionally, my dad tried to open him up about it, but it was totally futile. He just wouldn’t say anything.”
When Tucker did finally reveal the work, he did so with the words: “It would’ve been nice to have an exhibition locally.” Dazed, his family pushed him for more information, but he died before any proper cataloguing could begin. So they hung Tucker’s work up in his home and opened an impromptu exhibition. Thousands queued and the press dubbed him “the Secret Lowry” for his rendering of the industrial north.
Recognition eventually followed. Warrington Art Gallery put on a show, The Unseen Artist, in 2019, and Tucker is now represented by two galleries in Mayfair, London – Alon Zakaim Fine Art and Connaught Brown, which staged sell-out shows of some 40 works in 2022, hung around a poignant re-creation of his cluttered front parlour “studio”, complete with gas fire and betting slips. Today, Tucker’s oils can fetch up to £16,000 at auction. This Saturday, two works will go on show in a new exhibition, Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-seen, at Two Temple Place in London.
As Joe wrote the book, he learned Tucker had experienced a lot of trauma and loss in childhood. He was 10 when he lost his father, Eric, in the war. But he had lost an eight-month-old brother to pneumonia at the age of five, too. He also regularly visited an uncle, his mother Joan’s brother, in a psychiatric hospital, where he spent decades following a breakdown.
He never married nor had a family. Joe thinks this may be because of these losses, which might also explain why Tucker clung so tightly to his surroundings. “No wonder he valued community,” says Joe, “that sense of togetherness.” Belonging is a recurring theme, captured in his many pictures of pubs, where he found a second family. Joe’s one memory of him sketching is there. “He slipped a little pad out,” he says, “and kept it just below the table. Not a single person knew.” As for who his uncle chose to paint, Joe says: “They were ‘his people’ – the most working class, the most characterful, often older, lived-in people.”
In One-Eyed Lady, a woman stares out, smoking, while a slumped chap in a sheepskin zones out in the fug of 11.15 Gang. Features are often enlarged, exaggerated, flushed with beer. “You feel he loves the characters,” says Joe, “but he doesn’t venerate them. He is able to draw them without looking down or feeling sorry, to see them as they are.”
Often, their faces feel mask-like, as if he is suggesting that every one of them, like himself, has a secret self they are concealing. One surprising sub-genre is performers, especially circus clowns.
Art historian Ruth Millington, who wrote the exhibition catalogue for The Unseen Artist, says Tucker’s work is exceptional because it shows a working-class world that is so often invisible in the art world – and it shows it from the inside, without stereotyping. “Tucker was a master storyteller,” she says. “He portrays the world through a very distinctive lens – of working-class people in places that matter to them. They could have been sweet portrayals but the quality comes from capturing their humanity. They are not caricatures.”
She compares him to British artist Edward Burra, who painted an urban underworld, most notably Harlem in the 1930s. “There is the theatre of Burra in Tucker’s work, and the palette of the British surrealists, the burnt oranges, pale blues. He creates a clever sense of atmosphere with muted tones.”
As for those comparisons with LS Lowry, Milligan thinks there is actually “more that separates them than links them”. In works such as Hanson’s Factory there are familiar steely skies punctuated by slim chimneys, stooped figures in dark garb. But Tucker’s are distinct characters. “Tucker was in the mix,” Millington says. “Lowry was on the outside.”
Yet one of Joe’s most surprising discoveries came when a friend of his uncle’s said Tucker had once said he’d like to live in St Ives, Cornwall, and paint there. “I was so shocked,” he says, believing his uncle was torn. On one hand there was his rootedness and fervent pride in working-class society. And on the other, ambition and a wish for recognition, something that his lack of self-belief ultimately stopped him asking for. Only once did he speak to a Manchester gallery owner about selling his work. Eventually, three paintings were taken and two sold, but Tucker withdrew the third, perhaps feeling vulnerable and exposed. He never attempted it again.
“The fact is the art world is middle class,” says Joe. “You are asking to be admitted to an extremely exclusive party you haven’t been invited to. It hurts to then show you would love to attend.”
Here and there in his work, there are clues to this longing. Occasionally, a scene may feature paintings hanging on walls, which often appear to be his own. And his name appears on signs, too. “In one,” says Joe, “he has written ‘E and T Tucker: Artists’ on a van. T Tucker’s my dad, who’s a graphic designer. I found it very moving. It gives a sense of my uncle creating his own little world – and within this world, they are recognised.”
• The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker is published by Canongate on 30 January.
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