Eric Tucker (1932 - 2018)

Eric Tucker was born in Warrington, Lancashire in 1932. He left school at 14 and was apprenticed as a signwriter - a role he never took up. In his youth, he fought as an amateur and, briefly, a professional boxer. Following National Service and a year labouring on the construction of the Llanwern steelworks in South Wales, he returned to Warrington where he found casual work in a timber yard, a brewery, as a gravedigger and a building labourer. He never married or had children, and he lived for the rest of his life in the council house he shared with his mother and stepfather.

He drew from a young age and took up painting in his late 20s. The front room of the family home became his studio, and remained so until his death. With compositions assembled from memory and imagination, from the countless sketches he made on scraps of paper, and the magazines and newspapers he collected, all of his paintings were produced in this one, small room.

Self-educated in art, he was a regular visitor to the galleries of nearby Manchester - as well as the city’s drinking dens, both licensed and not. He was a firm believer that it was among the lowest echelons of society that the richest life was to be found.

He created images of the world he knew - working class life in the industrial north; the streets and back alleys, the pubs and clubs. He painted ordinary, working people - the “rough and ready” as he described them, by way of recommendation - as well as circus, cabaret and street performers. In all, he was drawn to the surreal and the characterful, and to those on the margins - with whom he felt a great affinity.

Largely unknown during his lifetime, he made few attempts to show or sell his work. Near the end of his life, he expressed a wish for an exhibition - leading his family to discover hundreds of paintings in his house, stacked up in bedrooms, in cupboards, on top of wardrobes and in the garden shed. In October 2018, three months after his death, they opened his house as a free gallery, attracting thousands of visitors and national press coverage.

Quoted in the i newspaper, art historian Ruth Millington said: “The collection is a remarkable, important find… I think he [Tucker] falls into the English surrealist movement.... His work might be tied with Julian Trevelyan or Eric Ravilious.”

Arts writer Elise Bell said, “I think to find a collection of that quality is an incredible coup for British art… Tucker was an untrained, working-class man who decided to depict his lived experience in a way we don’t often see outside of Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction houses. That he did this without any ambitions for recognition only makes the work he’s created more honest and true to the life he led.”

Writing in the Daily Mail, Robin Simon, editor of The British Art Journal, said: “Eric Tucker, like his hoard of paintings, is a real discovery. His style is very like that of L.S. Lowry. Here are the same pubs, clubs and factories, the same northern mixture of warmth and bleakness. There is a profound difference. Lowry was content with anonymous matchstick men, but Tucker depicts real individuals, characters you could see across a crowded room any night in Warrington… Tucker has a most accomplished painting technique in oils and watercolours, with a sound sense of tone and colour. This is serious stuff. What lends his paintings such a professional air must be the influence of the Belgian painter James Ensor. Tucker could have seen his works in books. There is the same love of clowns and crowds, and heightened characterisation. There can even be the same intensity in the application of paint.”

A note on the artist by his brother

My brother was one of life's irregulars.

Both ordinary and extraordinary.

What he did, what he created in his work, he did on his own.

Little support, little education, certainly no opportunity to go to Art School.

What he did was to plough his own furrow, to find himself as an artist, unmediated, for good or ill, by any formal training or involvement in the art establishment and its various movements and cliques over the decades he painted.

He painted from where he stood.

The jazz musician Thelonious Monk wrote 'A genius is the one most like himself'.

My brother in his life and his 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 or hope of recognition, he painted with total commitment.

He painted because he had to and in doing so conjured a world now lost - with a clarity and consistency that is both painful and joyful.

Tony Tucker.