The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker review – an artist in the family

The Guardian

30-01-2025

Joe Tucker's uncle, Eric, left school at 14 and worked as a labourer for several decades before taking early retirement in his 50s due to chronic arthritis. In his spare time he painted Lowry-esque vignettes of working-class life. After his death in 2018 at the age of 84, his family found a stash of more than 500 paintings in his terrace house in Warrington. As Tucker recalls, it felt 'like discovering a vast escape tunnel dug by a prisoner with just a spoon'. In addition to scenes from pubs, theatres and nightclubs, 'there were portraits of pigeon fanciers, surreal montages of clowns and carnival workers, pictures of down-and-outs, cabaret turns, Travellers, broad-shouldered housewives in headscarves, and slightly haunting, hobbling children'.
Tucker, a screenwriter and fellow Warrington native, arranged an exhibition of the work in his uncle's home in 2019. It drew thousands of visitors and garnered national media attention; a full retrospective at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery followed, and the paintings have since been exhibited in two Mayfair galleries. In The Secret Painter, Tucker unpacks the eccentric life behind this remarkable story.
Eric, who was single and lived with his mother for most of his life, cultivated a dishevelled look, sporting a faded bomber jacket held together by sticky tape; for a time, he insisted on using a rope as a belt. A former amateur boxer, he was solitary yet sociable, a raconteur who enjoyed carousing in disreputable drinking dens; he loved the comedy of Ken Dodd and had an 'almost crush-like' reverence for radio and TV personalities Allan Beswick and Paul O'Grady.
Despite his gregariousness, Eric was reserved about his paintings, and only displayed them publicly on a handful of occasions. That reticence is the book's central mystery, and Tucker investigates it with admirable sensitivity. His uncle, he explains, was held back by low self-esteem and extreme humility; his intense commitment to personal authenticity would have made the business side of the art world, with all its necessary schmoozing and falseness, impossibly intimidating. 'Formality, decorum, status: these were fictions that got in the way of camaraderie, humanity and the real stuff of life.'
Tucker believes Eric's lifelong distrust of the middle classes may have originated in his brutal mistreatment at the hands of sadistic army officers during his national service in the early 1950s. Childhood trauma – including his father's death in the second world war, and the tense atmosphere in the family home after his stepfather moved in – must also have been formative.
Tucker has considerable sympathy for his uncle, and shares some of his insecurities. Reflecting on his own unease after moving to London, he describes 'a faint feeling of resentment at the theatre, a sense that I'm not quite as pleased to be there as everyone else; a quiet enjoyment of the distress caused by lairy football fans singing on the tube'. In a thoughtful postscript, he laments the chasm between the cosmopolitan art milieu and the wider public: 'Many of those most moved by [Eric's] work were … working-class people – people very much like my uncle's characters, who didn't necessarily look like committed gallery-goers'.
This memoir is beautifully written, tenderly affectionate, witty and touching. In one particularly poignant section, Tucker tracks down and interviews a woman with whom Eric had a short-lived romance in the 1960s. She had been married at the time; the affair apparently meant more to him than it had to her, and she ended it. It seems he never quite recovered from the heartbreak.
The human connection that was lacking in Eric's domestic life could be found in abundance in his paintings, which evoke a strong sense of community and togetherness. But for Tucker's efforts, they might have languished in obscurity. With its idiosyncratic blend of serious purpose and disarming humour, The Secret Painter is a fitting tribute to its subject. Eric Tucker's posthumous success was a vindication of the life he chose to live: 'To a world that told him in innumerable ways that he couldn't be an artist, he proved that he was and that he couldn't not be. By doing the work, with unwavering commitment.'
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