Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It’s a cliché of sorts — the misunderstood loner who, on their death, leaves behind a previously unsuspected treasure trove of extraordinary artistic achievement, only to be lauded too late. But the story of Eric Tucker, who lived and secretly painted a phenomenal body of work in a cramped end-of-terrace house in the town of Warrington near Merseyside, transcends it. In The Secret Painter, a short memoir written by his nephew Joe — one of the family members who found nearly 500 paintings stashed in bedrooms and parlours after Eric’s death in 2018 — we meet a man as mysterious to his loving family as to the appreciative new audience who have discovered his work since then.“I don’t remember seeing him paint even once,” writes Joe, musing on this paradoxical personality: “He was a gregarious raconteur, unafraid to express firm opinions, but when it came to this matter he was silent. He never spoke about his work.”And Eric’s sophisticated depictions of the pubs, clubs and streets in his hometown might — and what a tragedy! — have lain unloved. But the book recounts how the family became determined to correct the oversight of this former labourer’s talent, caused, as Joe tells it, by Eric’s own mix of diffidence and cantankerousness. Joe’s detective work also disinters upsetting memories of art-world rejections in both London and Manchester, the city whose galleries the self-taught Eric had haunted all his life.Invalided out of work in his fifties and still living with his mother, he kept on painting prolifically — townscapes but also scenes of Wales, which he made “his own Provence”, modelling these paintings on his post-impressionist heroes. At last, in his eighties and not far off death, Eric finally asked the family to try to get him an exhibition, but he didn’t live to see it. Joe and his father, Eric’s brother, had no idea of the extent of his talent or the volume of work until he then left it in their hands. Overwhelmed, they decided to convert his modest former home into a gallery for a weekend — dubbed a “terraced house Tate” in the book. A short item on the BBC regional news bulletin sent thousands of people to queue at the garden gate, some later leaving in tears, moved by the pictures.Two small shows in Mayfair followed — complete with recreations of a backstreet pub and of his parlour painting room — as well as the hoped-for show in a Warrington public gallery. For Joe and his family, belated recognition for their enigmatic, brilliant relative was precious because it was mutual: the local audience saw their world celebrated with skill and affection.Tucker has been compared to LS Lowry, and he had a peculiar encounter with the more famous painter of England’s northern towns and cities. But the oils and watercolours that Tucker left his family are a world away in mood and execution from Lowry’s dour industrial scenes and undifferentiated stick figures. In Eric’s pictures, figures are imbued with individuality and verve, rounded in every sense. You wish you were having as good a time as his pubgoers. The tableaux are conveyed in warm pinks, ochres and blacks — yes, there are flat caps and even a dogfight, but so much more. The bowlers and trilbies of the club singers and jazz bands, the battered titfers of drinkers and a “going out” hat perched on a woman’s shampoo-and-set. These costumes belong to the largely lost world of industrial working-class culture in northern towns, lovingly recorded but also transformed into a joyful carnivalesque.There is certainly some painful personal and social history woven through this story. Chapters on Eric’s early deprivation and traumatic childhood bereavement (and speculation on why he was such a mystery even to his own immediate family) will make you wince. The book can’t decide if he was trapped at home, or had fiercely rejected the idea of “getting out to get on”, as the distant policy world describes the way the socially mobile tend to quit their hometowns for London. Maybe both.But the art’s the thing. As Joe writes, “he saw that there was a working-class culture and it was rich and important.” The author remembers his uncle discreetly taking out paper and pencil in a pub and quietly sketching the “characters” that he would later work into elaborate compositions at home, net curtains drawn and frosted glass door pulled to. “There was something interminably solitary about him,” recalls Joe, to whom he was close — he depicted a world in which he was embedded but then put the paintings out of sight.Eric had no formal training. But as his nephew argues, some of the pictures show a sophisticated transposition of motifs from art down the ages — a card game (reproduced in the hardback edition) or a crowd carousing as they watch the show. To my eye, he seems closer to Toulouse-Lautrec than to Lowry, given the “misfit energy” that animates both Eric’s canvases and his life story. Maybe that is the secret of art — along with the life-long self-discipline and compulsion to create, of course.Eric’s advice to a young Joe, drawing after school, was excellent: “fill the page,” by which he meant try to compose a picture, and “know when to stop”. His nephew has done both with this slim but fascinating portrait.The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker Canongate, £25, 224 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
