ReadingThe 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.
🏏 ‘Street Cricket’ (Eric Tucker)
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.
‘Work’ (FM Brown) ~ thought to be Eric’s favourite painting (viewed by him in the Manchester Gallery)
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.
‘The Nitpickers’ (Edward Burra)
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.)
‘Two Miners’ (Roger Hampson)
‘Portrait of a Coal Miner’ (E Tucker)
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’.
‘Sunday Night’ (E Tucker)
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”
By no means just a “Sunday painter”: The Secret Painter is Joe Tucker’s memoir about his favourite uncle – Eric Tucker, a lifelong bachelor, proudly working class, a man who worked at manual labouring jobs all his life, ordinary and yet at the same time unconventional and exceptional. Beneath the surface however Eric was harbouring a big secret. He was also an artist flying completely under the radar…for six decades up to his death in 2018 Eric prolifically churned out painting after painting, focusing on the everyday scenes of working class life in Warrington and the Northwest of England, including detailed portraits of locals. His immediate family including Joe were only vaguely aware of this, other side of “Our Eric’s” life and had no inkling of the scale of his artistic pursuits.
⇑ ‘Pub Scene’ (Eric Tucker)
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Tidying up the shambolic clutter of Eric’s small council house after his funeral Joe, his father and aunt unearthed some 540 or so paintings by Eric that he had stashed in numerous nooks and crannies of the terrace house. It was a complete revelation…(Joe reflected) ”what I’d thought of as maybe a pastime—inasmuch as I’d thought about it at all—I realised was the centre of his life, at the core of who he was”.
‘The Card Players’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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In The Secret Painter¹ nephew Joe slowly pieces together aspects of his enigmatic uncle’s life, including the trials and tribulations of living with a man seen by some as a bit of an oddball², so set in his own frustratingly idiosyncratic ways that he stubbornly refused to embrace change of any sort. Eric’s work “career” was one of drifting from job to job – builder’s labourer, gravedigger, pro boxer (briefly), etc. Out of this undistinguished CV Eric made himself without any formal art training into a serious and accomplished painter and consummate sketcher³.
⇑ ‘Horses’ (Eric Tucker)
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Raising a flag on behalf of the arts in Warrington: While Joe’s reasons for writing the memoir were motivated by a desire to bestow on his uncle the recognition of his artistic achievements that he richly deserved, he had a secondary mission in the book – to refute the widespread assumption that Warrington was bereft of anything culturally worthwhile (aside perhaps from the local Warrington Wolves rugby league club). Warrington has long been the butt of many jokes throughout the country, stigmatised as a cultural desert…in fact the verdict was official, in 2015 the town was voted “Worst Place for Culture in Britain!” Joe’s book about the unknown artist in his family provides a heartfelt disavowal of these complacent assumptions and prejudices from outsiders about his home town.
‘The Ragtatter’s Horse’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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“Our Eric’s” secret calling: Considering the mountain of paintings and drawings completed by Tucker over six decades, it’s astounding that his family knew so little about his artistic pastime. But Eric was deeply distrustful by nature, and resistant to revealing anything about his hidden activities with paintbrush and canvas, especially to outsiders⁴. Eric had made no effort to promote his art⁵, though almost at the end of his life he relented a bit and expressed a wish to have an exhibition of his paintings in Warrington after his death. It’s a testimony to Joe Tucker and his father Tony (Eric’s younger brother) that the family managed to sort through the farrago of a house, collect and catalogue all the paintings and then arrange for that public exhibition that he had wished for. The efforts that Eric’s relatives went to to make the posthumous exhibition happen was nigh on Herculean and we can sense just how important it was to Joe that they, as he put it, “crack the supposedly cliquish art world”. You get the feeling that Joe, beyond any filial loyalties he may feel towards his uncle, genuinely believed in the importance of Eric’s artwork. By exposing Eric’s oeuvre of paintings to the world, they were documenting an entire working class culture and lifestyle that no longer exists.
‘Bar scene with man smoking’ (Eric Tucker) ⇑
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The two-day exhibition in Eric’s modest terrace house did go ahead and proved to be spectacularly successful beyond all expectations and from there the whole thing snowballed…a Warrington retrospective of Eric’s paintings, followed by exhibitions in that Mecca of London art galleries, Cork Street. Today, Eric’s paintings of working class Warrington life sell for up to £15,000 to £20,000 – not quite in the stratosphere of “Blue Poles” or “Sunflowers”, but figures that Eric, if he was still around, would dare not have dreamed possible.
‘Industrial Scene’ (LS Lowry) ⇑
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The “Secret Lowry”: The sudden rise from obscurity to art celebrity of Eric, a working man artist from Warrington, inevitably led the media to draw parallels with another celebrated delineator of the images of working class Lancashire, LS Lowry. The similarities are however superficial, Lowry (from a middle class background) focused mainly on industrial urban landscapes—typically distance vistas with humans drawn as anonymous, stylised figures (often matchstick people)—whereas Tucker created detailed images of working class people (his own people) in their typical milieus, pubs, streets, workplaces, engaging in entertainment, etc. As the Tucker exhibition’s curator Janice Hayes put it: “in Lowry, the characters are almost incidental. For Eric, you actually feel that you know some of these people” (“Eric Tucker: Exhibition fulfils ‘unseen’ artist’s final wish”, Ian Youngs, BBC News, 23–Nov–2019, www.bbc.com).
Schoolboy Joe Tucker with his uncle Eric (source: BBC World Service) ⇑
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Postscript: The sudden popularity of Eric’s paintings have generated an instant windfall, and it is likely to transform the late Warrington artist’s modest and even meagre estate at the time of his death into something very lucrative. So, an interesting side question to ponder might be, who are the beneficiaries of the solitary deceased bachelor?
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This vignette from the book conveys a sense of Eric’s customary quick and blunt wit, eg, on an overseas family cruise a mindreader, no doubt to his immediate regret, had the misfortune to choose Eric from the audience as part of his show, leading to the following exchange:
Mindreader: Where are you from?
Eric: You’re the bloody mindreader, you tell me!
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¹ described by The Telegraph (UK) as “an engaging blend of biographical sleuthing and personal memoir”
² Eric’s personality, the author infers, was a curious mix of the “solitary” and the “sociable”
³ ever mindful of keeping his artistic proclivities as unobtrusive as possible, Eric would seat himself in a good spot in pubs and working men’s clubs, quietly sipping a pint while he (surreptitiously) sketched the patrons
⁴ he was also suspicious of some of his own family members, often unreasonably so
⁵ just about the only exception to this was when Eric permitted a very low-key exhibition of his paintings in a Warrington pub in 1963
When critic Martin Esslin coined the term “Theatre of the Absurd”, many saw that iconoclastic 1950s and 60s theatre movement as more or less exclusively a French phenomena. And it’s easy to see why that impression was a persuasive one. All the early key figures of absurdist theatre had a connexion with France, specifically with Paris. While only Jean Genet was born in the country, the other seminal names in the Theatre of the Absurd exiled themselves from their native countries to Paris before the onset of the movement – Beckett born in Dublin but spent most of his adult life in France; Adamov, a Russian–born Armenian moved to Paris at 16; Ionesco, Romanian–born but lived most of his life in France. Fernando Arrabal, born in a Spanish enclave in Morocco, also an important “member” of that “non–club” of unconventional writers for the stage, exiled himself from the authoritarianism of Franco’s Spain to Paris in his early twenties (Arrabal described himself as “desterrado” (“half–expatriate”, “half–exiled“).
The Automobile Graveyard, Arrabal
Far from being confined to Parisian literary circles, the Theatre of the Absurd had an impact in other countries during this period. Most notably Harold Pinter in Britain and Edward Albee in the US were important contributors to the movement. Other playwrights from outside France whose works express the preoccupations, observations on morality and trappings of absurdist drama include NF Simpson, James Saunders and David Campton (all from England), Sam Shepard and Arthur Kopit (USA), Václav Havel (Czechoslovakia) and Max Frisch (Switzerland).
The Dumb Waiter, Pinter (source: Theatre Press)
The “Theatre of the Absurd” appellation never sat well with the practitioners themselves who tended to reject this description of their art§. They “saw themselves as individual artists, not part of a collective, and viewed their plays as nothing more than the expression of their personal vision of the world” (‘Stage School: What Is Theatre of the Absurd?’ (Jennifer Chamberlain), The Skinny, 17 Feb. 2016, www.theskinny.co.uk). Not all of the “absurdists” were adherents of existentialism—like the movement’s spiritual father Camus—some were more concerned with the irrationality of contemporary human society. The common denominator for this group of dramatists is a rejection of realism. In its void the plays “express…images that are themselves absurd…(the prevalence of) bizarre situations and objects, both sad and comic” (Pears Cyclopedia, 82nd Ed, 1973–74), eg, aged parents confined (literally and symbolically) to dustbins (Beckett). A motif of the absurdist play is the presence of dada and surrealist elements, the first demonstrated in an air of irrationality and the absence of meaning and the latter in vivid depictions of dreamlike images (‘Theater of the Time’ (Noah Pion), Digital Theater Profile II: Jean Genet, www.journeys.dartmouth.edu).
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For more detail on the history and “pre–history” of the absurdist drama movement see the 2021 post ‘Theatre of the Absurd: Anti–Realism, Anti–Language, Anti–Play?’(open or copy link below):
