“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.
But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.
He depicted scenes of sociability yet he himself was an uncommunicative loner with few close friends. But he had a sociable side. The young Joe was impressed by how he and Eric were once rescued from a rainstorm by a passing lorry driver who obviously knew his uncle. And Eric was warm and attentive toward Joe. “He’d school me in drawing, how to fill in a football coupon… what I could expect from a Ken Dodd live show. Long sermons on the latter.” Eric, who never married, was devoted to his mother, but he was not like some Alan Bennett character, emasculated by that connection. As a young man he’d had a boxing licence, and he remained a hard man in his attitudes. When, in his youth, Joe reported back on a Sunday school lesson about turning the other cheek, Eric, grasping his shoulders, counselled: “Joe, if someone hits you, you always hit them back.” With characteristic drollery, Joe Tucker observes, “In seconds, 45 minutes of gentle instilled Christian doctrine was overturned.”
Eric Tucker wasn’t totally secretive about his art. He had his painting room in the house, where he worked behind net curtains. Family members were not exactly barred from it, but they were not encouraged to enter, and he seldom went public with his work. He did a painting of a horse, which was displayed in the window of a Warrington bookies, until the council demanded its removal, because passing drivers were slowing to admire it. He had art books mingled in with his boxing magazines.
Joe probes the mysteries of his uncle’s life, taking on the role of detective. The revelations come as a series of well-spaced detonations, and it would be treacherous to reveal too many, but here is one: Eric’s family found his decision, in his 80s, not to have a pacemaker fitted perverse, since it would have eased his heart condition and prolonged his life. But it turns out that Eric, holding up his hands, had explained to a friend: “These would still be the same” – riddled with the arthritis that was inhibiting his ability to paint.
A central mystery is why he never tried harder to profit from his art. There are poignant scenes of Eric, ill at ease in hushed art galleries (in one of which he had a gnomic exchange with LS Lowry), and I don’t think I need preface the following broad statement with a spoiler alert: dealing with the middle class “buggers” of the art world would have taken Eric Tucker out of his working-class comfort zone – the world he depicted in his paintings. “Making art was necessary for him, though sharing it was not.”
The Secret Painter is a bracingly northern corrective (admittedly, I’m a northerner myself) to the metropolitan hype and verbiage that surrounds so much art. It’s timely, too, in that the cohort to which Eric Tucker belonged, white working-class male, is often cited as the most left-behind. Joe Tucker writes with a beautiful casualness. The street on which Eric and his mother lived is a “sleepy loop”; his pockets contained “a grubby casserole of betting slips, lint and sachets of sugar.” I had never heard of Eric Tucker when I read this book and, to maximise the bittersweet savour of the payoff, I advise readers not to Google his name in advance.
The Night in Venice by AJ (Andrew) Martin is published by W&N (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
