The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker: He died without knowing – now his art sells for £15,000
THE SECRET PAINTER by Joe Tucker (Canongate £18.99, 224pp)
Eric Tucker never had a career, lived with his mother for most of his life and probably never had a girlfriend.
In his final years he became increasingly odd, filling his house with old newspapers and insisting on wearing clothes that were held together by Sellotape.
Yet Eric left behind an extraordinary legacy. After he died in 2018, as his relatives cleared his council house of years of clutter, they found more than 500 paintings and hundreds more sketches located in every nook and cranny of the property, some even stuffed into empty compost bags in the ruins of an old air raid shelter.
It was, Eric’s nephew Joe says, ‘like discovering a vast escape tunnel dug by a prisoner with just a spoon’.
His family knew that Eric liked to paint, but they had no idea just how talented an artist he was. The paintings, done over six decades, were all images of working-class life in the north-west of England: children playing in alleyways, pigeon-fanciers, tramps.
By any conventional measure Eric achieved little during his lifetime. Born in Warrington, Cheshire, he left school at 14 and had a string of temporary labouring jobs, including working as a grave digger, before he eventually ended up loading lorries for a construction company.
After Eric’s death, Joe Tucker, a TV scriptwriter, set out to try to understand more about his uncle’s life. How had this seemingly unpromising man become such an accomplished artist?
Eric’s brother – Joe’s father – believed that his education had come largely from his regular visits to Manchester’s two public art galleries. ‘Even into his 70s and early 80s, with his mobility failing, he would catch a bus to the city to get a pint and visit a gallery.’
As a child, Joe had spent a lot of time with his uncle, but couldn’t remember ever seeing him paint. Eric seemed to have almost no interest in anyone seeing his work, although he did once sell a few paintings through a local gallery. When he found out he had to pay the gallery a commission, he was so outraged that he took the remaining picture and stormed out.
Posthumously Popular: One-Eyed Lady, an Eric Tucker painting
When Eric was diagnosed with heart problems, he refused to stay in hospital or go into a care home, because ‘he was extremely worried about being away from his paintings’. Shortly before he died, aged 86, Eric finally confided to his brother that he would have liked to have had his work exhibited.
On the spur of the moment, Joe decided that, to honour his uncle’s memory, he and his parents would hold a two-day pop-up exhibition in Eric’s house (now cleared of its clutter), showing 60 of his paintings.
As the day approached, Joe worried that ‘we were about to spend two days alone in Eric’s house, surrounded by his paintings . . . a final, heartbreaking addendum to his life’.
There had only been a trickle of local publicity, and then a few days before the show, the Mail ran a story about Eric. Other news outlets picked up the story. Suddenly, Eric Tucker and his paintings were big news. Even before the exhibition opened, Joe was astonished to see ‘a long line of people . . . more than we could fit in my uncle’s house’.
In total, 2,000 people came to view Eric’s paintings – many left visibly moved by what they had seen.
The following year, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery held a retrospective of Eric’s work. Two galleries in London’s prestigious Cork Street put on an exhibition and it was the fastest-selling in their history. Eric has been even been dubbed ‘the secret Lowry’ and his paintings now sell for up to £15,000.
Time will tell if his work will be acquired by major galleries. If this acclaim had happened during his lifetime, would this talented, contrary, secretive man have been pleased or not? No one can say, but this warm, often funny book, is a real gem.