THE SECRET PAINTER

By Joe Tucker

Canongate Books. 212 pages. £18.99. ISBN 978-1=80530-066-3

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Art is big business these days. Or so we’re told as record prices are achieved for works that are then often hidden away where most of us can’t see them. And a TV show like Fake or Fortune encourages the belief that the real test of a work of art is its monetary value. Its artistic value might be questionable, but it doesn’t matter if it has the right name attached to it.

Eric Tucker didn’t have the right name, at least not in his lifetime. He sold two paintings after they were exhibited by a Manchester art dealer, and possibly one or two more to family members. His work was never noticed by critics, again not until he was dead. And yet after his death it was discovered that several hundred paintings were stored in the “featureless red brick council house” where he had lived for many years with his mother and stepfather. Only a few people knew that he painted. He had little or no contact with other artists (he met L.S. Lowry once, and only briefly) and certainly none with curators, arts officers, or others who might have been useful in terms of spreading the word about him, or arranging for his work to be exhibited. They just didn’t know about him.  And, to be fair, he didn’t want to know about them. They weren’t to be trusted, and he resented the fact that the dealer who had sold his two paintings had taken a cut from the fees paid for them.

Tucker was born in Warrington, where he lived all his life, in 1932. He left school at 14 as many working-class youngsters did in those days, and “without qualifications“,  according to Joe Tucker, Eric’s nephew. It’s difficult to know for sure whether or not Eric was taking an interest in art while at school, though it’s unlikely there was any sort of provision for art education at the kind of establishment he would have attended.  He did start an apprenticeship as a signwriter, but “never finished the course, preferring instead to take casual labouring jobs where, in the short term at least, the pay was better”.  It is known that he took a sketching pad with him when he went to the boxing club where he and a friend trained. He fought in amateur competitions, and briefly as a professional boxer. He also participated in fairground boxing matches where it was possible to earn a few pounds if you could survive three rounds with the resident fighter, usually a professional on the way down. My father took a few punches trying to raise a little money when he was unemployed during the dark days of the 1930s Depression.

National Service claimed Eric in 1950 and he was posted to the Royal Horse Guards in Windsor, where, Joe says, his behaviour brought him “more than one trip to the ‘glasshouse’ – military prison, a prescription of solitary confinement and sometimes forced labour, delivered with a sprinkling of sadism”. I can imagine what the officers in the Royal Horse Guards would have been like in the 1950s and how they would have viewed and treated someone like Eric, a working-class northerner and a disobedient one, at that. My own experience of army life in Germany in the 1950s, while not causing me any great problems, taught me to be wary of officers. They weren’t like us. One thought comes to mind, did Eric ever paint any pictures of soldiers and army life in general? Or did he just prefer to forget the whole experience?

Following National Service, Eric worked for a time in South Wales before returning to Warrington and, among other jobs, employment in a chemical plant (“without adequate protection”), and later for a builder. The latter work involved him in delivering equipment to various sites until ill-health caused him to switch to work in the builder’s yard where he loaded and unloaded lorries as they came and went. It was during this period that a young art student had a summer job alongside Eric who, when he found out what the young man was studying, confided in him that he painted and had always nursed a dream to move to St Ives to paint there. It was unusual for him to be that open about his painting, or his hidden dreams. Would he have painted the same sort of pictures had he got to Cornwall and mixed with the artists there? I suspect he needed his home ground, and its challenges, to inspire him.

It’s interesting to consider what Eric was like as a person. It seems to be agreed that, he was “a highly sociable character – most of his art chronicles the social life of his community – but also a very solitary figure”. He had friends – there is a photo of him with a crowd of them in his younger days - and he liked to frequent pubs and the local betting shop. But it’s possible to be sociable and yet still retain a highly developed sense of one’s own uniqueness. Eric must have known that his talent for drawing and painting set him apart in many ways from the people he met and mixed with. Was his reluctance to talk openly about art with most people due to his working-class upbringing. You don’t want to appear “clever” to your friends and associates.  As my father, an old sailor, docker, steeplejack, and labourer, would say : “Don’t make a song and dance about it. Just do the job”.  

Joe Tucker, when researching Eric’s life, tracked down a few of his friends, including Mr Hassan, who knew him from the betting shop where, he said, Eric was the only person who talked to him. I can believe that, knowing what life was like in northern towns in the 1950s and 1960s, and how blacks and Asians were looked on by most people. Mr Hassan seems to have stayed friends with Eric to the end, and when he was housebound called regularly to take his betting slips and money to the bookies. Other old friends had died, or were suffering from ailments of one kind or another, but Joe saw some survivors and gained a few insights into Eric’s character. What did he do, for example, when he went into Manchester and didn’t come home until the following day? Because Eric lived with his mother most of his life some people, including at least two I talked to about him, have wondered if he was gay? He wasn’t, and Joe located a lady Eric had met in Paris and wanted to form a close relationship with. She was married and lived in Yorkshire, and Eric at one point travelled to see her in a vain attempt to persuade her to leave her husband.

It's mentioned that, when in Manchester, Eric liked to frequent some of “the city’s roughest dives – long since demolished venues such as Tommy Ducks, a pub which in a disconcerting mix of chauvinism and the macabre, had ladies’ underwear hanging from its ceiling and coffins for tables”. I was amused because, in the 1970s, I regularly met friends there when I travelled over from Preston for the day. Liston’s Music Hall is also referred to as one of Eric’s watering holes, but he must have had a greater tolerance than me for the "rough and ready”, because it seemed a dreary place with bad beer. But I only got there when it was on its last legs, so perhaps didn’t experience it at its best.

But what of Eric’s paintings while he was working, placing his bets, and calling in various pubs? He was obviously busy with them, as witness the hundreds found in the house after he died, not to mention hundreds of drawings. They point to a man who could, when he chose, talk in an informed way about art, as his brother recollected about their visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Joe says there were numerous art books and magazines in the room in the council house he shared with his mother after his stepfather (with whom he’d always had a difficult relationship) died, and Eric regularly visited the Whitworth and the City Art Gallery in Manchester as well as other galleries, both public and private. He travelled to London when there was an exhibition of work by Edward Burra, one of his favourite artists. He also admired some of David Hockney’s work. I think Burra would have liked Eric’s paintings. And it occurs to me to suggest that Breughel and Daumier would have recognised what he was doing by recording the daily activities of ordinary people. Sometimes satirical but without malice.

Eric’s work has been compared to that of L.S. Lowry, inevitably I suspect because to metropolitan critics they both hail from the North West, eschewed abstraction in favour of the figurative, and created bodies of “Outsider Art” that often focused on the streets and the people in them. But there are significant differences, one of which is, to my mind, of key importance. It has always seemed to me that Lowry is seeing people from a distance. He’s never one of them. I think it’s one reason why I’ve never really completely warmed to his work. Eric Tucker, on the other hand, is very much involved with the people he portrays. Lowry’s people are a crowd, Tucker’s are individuals. I can’t imagine Lowry painting something like the colourful picture Tucker creates of couples in a jazz club gazing fondly at each other while the background shows the musicians skilfully rendered in line on the bandstand, with a singer in front of them.

I’m not dismissing Lowry, and there are some landscapes, industrial and otherwise, I admire. I simply want to stress that Eric Tucker was very much his own man in terms of his way of looking at the everyday world, and his closeness to it. His nephew describes how, on a visit to a pub, Eric held his pad below the level of the table and did a quick sketch to take home and work up into a painting.  

Eric died in 2018. His last years were affected by arthritis and heart problems which kept him confined to the house. And limited his capacity to paint.  When his friend, Mr Hassan, tried to encourage him to have a pacemaker fitted, he held up his hands and said, “But these will still be the same”. It was as if he’d come to the conclusion that life without painting wasn’t worth living.

Joe Tucker tried hard to draw attention to his uncle’s work, as did his father, Eric’s brother. It wasn’t easy to arouse any interest from the people at Warrington Art Gallery, where requests to talk to the curator were met with replies which inevitably said, “He’s in a meeting”. In other words he or she didn’t want to be bothered with information about an unknown local artist. Not until Joe (living in London and active as a television scriptwriter) started to use his contacts in the media to provide publicity for an exhibition staged in the house where Eric lived and died. Word spread and people queued around the block to look at a selection of his paintings. It was then that Warrington and its “secret painter” began to attract notice in the wider world, and the bureaucrats in the town hall were alerted to the potential for publicity and started to accept that Eric Tucker was worthy of notice.

The Secret Painter is an engaging book and Joe Tucker knows how to tell a story. It’s a warm book, too, in the way that Eric Tucker’s paintings are warm. The story doesn’t only deal with his life. It also evokes a time when old habits and customs were “still hanging on from the previous century”, in Joe’s words.  I recall from my childhood (I was born in 1936, four years after Eric) things that were still to be seen, “like a knife sharpener man….who toured the cobbled streets on a bike with a stone wheel attached, which he pressed housewives’ knives to…..And the local rag and bone man with his horse and cart”. I can even remember a street singer, not a local drunk but a man with a not-unpleasant voice walking down the middle of the street singing a well-known song from fifty or more years before, and being sent out to give him a penny or two.

I hope that Joe Tucker’s book, and the interest it has aroused in national newspapers and on radio, will result in an exhibition of the best of Eric’s work being staged in a major North West city, such as Manchester or Liverpool. I was intrigued by the fact that Manchester was more often mentioned than Liverpool in the narrative of Eric’s life. He did have a small exhibition in the Cemetery Hotel in Warrington in 1963 which got a review in the Liverpool Echo. But there doesn’t appear to be much evidence to show that he spent time in the city. It might be thought that his liking for low-life, for “characters”, and his conviction that “it was among the very lowest echelons of society that the richest life was to be found” (a Romantic notion, some might say), would have inclined him to frequent the working-class and downbeat dockside areas of a port like Liverpool. I’m just curious when I wonder about this.

There are some words that Eric’s brother (Joe Tucker’s father) wrote for a handout available when the exhibition took place at the house, and I think they’re worth quoting here : “My brother in his life and art was always exactly himself…..He lacked confidence, aspiration and ambition but was also mercifully free of pretence, artfulness and self-aggrandisement in his work…With little thought of hope or recognition, he painted with total commitment….He painted because he had to and in doing so he conjured a world now lost….with a clarity and consistency that is both painful and joyful”.