The Secret Lowry
Shunned by the art establishment all his life, Eric Tucker carried on painting regardless. When he died, his brother found his home crammed with masterly portraits of Northern working- class life. Now they’re selling for small fortunes...
WHEN retired labourer Eric Tucker died last year, his friends and neighbours mourned him as a charismatic pub regular who enjoyed a flutter on the horses. But when his family cleared the end-of-terrace council home in Warrington where he had lived since the 1950s, they were stunned.
Every alcove, drawer and outbuilding was stuffed with a treasure trove of exquisite sketches and paintings Eric had created in secret.
Now the former professional boxer – whose paintings were rejected by the art establishment while he was alive – is finally to have his talent celebrated after the unexpected discovery led critics to laud him as ‘the hidden Lowry’.
Eric’s gentle depictions of working-class life in the North West have inspired the comparison with the famous Manchester-born artist, whose iconic industrial-era street scenes and stick figures from Pendlebury and Salford left an enormous cultural legacy.
Eric’s works, with portraits of the people he met in local pubs, betting shops and working men’s clubs, made him a ‘masterful storyteller… who turned the most mundane scenes into atmospheric, almost eccentric paintings’, according to respected art critic Ruth Millington.
He has even received posthumous praise for making what one critic described as ‘a significant contribution to modern British art’ and pieces of his work are now expected to sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Eric’s astonishing legacy is now being honoured at a retrospective exhibition at the Warrington Art Gallery after his family organised a viewing at his home which drew a crowd of more than 2,000 people in just two days. The gallery has even recreated the parlour in his terraced home where he painted his masterpieces.
Yet Eric, who died aged 86 last July, was entirely self-taught and nearly gave up painting completely after he was repeatedly rejected by galleries and the Royal Academy.
Fortunately, he continued to pursue his passion regardless, painting in the evenings after work in the front parlour of the two-up, two-down home he had shared with his mother.
His younger brother Tony told The Mail on Sunday that although he was aware of Eric’s skill as an artist, he had no idea how prolific he was.
‘I was amazed,’ he said. ‘There were lots of paintings I’d never seen in my life. There was stuff in the loft, even works in an old air raid shelter in the garden. It was stacked full of paintings in there.
‘He had no idea of how to be an artist, to be aware of your work and its value. But his confidence grew as he got better and better, and I think he did become more confident in his work.’
Tony, 78, describes how his brother had always loved drawing as a child, but was forced to become a working man after their father, who joined the Royal Lancers during the Second World War, was killed by German tanks at El-Alamein. Eric left school aged 14 and began an apprenticeship as a sign writer. But he quit to become a labourer on building sites, supplementing his income with work as a professional boxer around the Warrington area at weekends.
Incongruously, it was his love of boxing that provided the inspiration for his painting. Every night he would return from work to paint detailed pictures of the greatest boxers of the day, including Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Many of his sketches were also made directly from real life. A regular in local pubs and bookmakers, Eric would surreptitiously sketch the working men and women of his home town as they drank, gambled and laughed.
His meticulous s ketch-books provided a release from his dour day-to-day life. Certainly no one on the building sites knew the strapping 6ft labourer lugging bricks up and down a rickety ladder was an accomplished artist.
Lowry, too, painted in the evenings after working full-time as a rent collector.
Tony’s son Joe Tucker, a successful screenwriter, said his uncle ‘definitely looked more like an ageing boxer than an artist’.
He added: ‘It was only after he’d died and my dad found drawers full of these little pub sketches that we realised just how often he’d obviously done this.’
ERIC, who never married, did attempt to get recognition for his work – but it was a bitter experience. Tony says he mana ged to sell t wo paintings through a dealer, but the stress – and the shock of having to pay commission to the dealer – put him off. Still, Tony persuaded him to enter two paintings into the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition during the 1980s.
Full of hope, Tony drove Eric to London – only for them to return after another rejection.
Tony says: ‘ It’s not easy when you’re an outsider. I imagine lots of paintings are rejected by the Royal Academy, but it still hurt.
‘In the early years, a Manchester
gallery sold two paintings. But the gallery owner didn’t want to take any more. He said they were “Lowry- esque”. I argued t hat Lowry was an outsider looking at working-class life, while my brother was an insider. He was one of the crowd because he drank in the clubs and pubs of Warrington and Manchester, all the dives he loved, so it was a different perspective.
‘But after those knockbacks, Eric decided that was that.’
Over the years, his family bought some of his paintings and he occasionally gave some away as Christmas presents. Eventually, his worsening arthritis stopped him from painting, and when degenerative heart disease threatened his life, he made a heartfelt plea to his brother to help him finally achieve his dream.
‘In the last six months of his life he said, “It would be nice if I could have had some of my paintings in my hometown gallery.” So I told him I wanted to start cataloguing his paintings and maybe we could then approach them.’ Sadly, Eric died before this could be realised.
But in his memory, the family decided to turn his home into a gallery to honour his life’s work. They stripped the house, painted the walls white and filled every space with his paintings and sketches.
Over two days, thousands queued up to view his work, some with pockets stuffed with cash. It brought Eric – finally – to the attention of Warrington Art Gallery, which is exhibiting his paintings for the next few months.
HE WOULD have been over the moon about the exhibition,’ says Tony. ‘ He was a proud man and it was his lifelong dream to have something exhibited there. Sadly, he never got to see that. But to have a full retrospective with so many of his life’s works there, he would have been overjoyed.
‘I think he would smile if he had known the furniture and equipment from the parlour had been taken there. The room where he spent so much time would be looked at by visitors. He would have laughed.’