“WARRINGTON’S SECRET LOWRY”
This is the story of a Warrington artist whose paintings and illustrations we almost didn’t get to see. It is the tale of an artist whose focus on producing art – mostly Northern scenes of social and industrial working class life – and his reluctance to actively promote it during his lifetime led to him acquiring the nickname “Warrington’s Secret Lowry”.
It’s a label that in my opinion does not do him justice. To my mind there’s more depth, nuance, variety and colour to Eric Tucker’s work than that of the legendary Salford artist. Oh listen to me, writing as if I’m some kind of art critic! Let’s cut to the quick and look at things in a proper no-nonsense Warrington way: Eric Tucker was a fine, fine painter and thanks to his family’s efforts, his work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.
Born in 1932, some of Eric’s earliest work was sketched onto the inside of a stair cupboard where he and his brother were sent to hide during the air raids of WW2.
“I was a toddler at the time so my recollections are vague,” recalled Eric’s younger brother Tony. “But years later my grandmother showed me where she used to put us for safekeeping when the sirens sounded. On the walls were dozens of Eric’s drawings, many of them caricatures of the much-hated Adolf Hitler.”
The Tucker family had good reason to despise the Nazi leader – the war he’d started had left them fatherless. “I have no recollection of my father at all,” said Tony “But I believe his death impacted on my brother greatly. It’s the kind of thing you never really recover from isn’t it?”
Tony believes some of his late brother’s creativity may have come from his dad. “He was an Assistant Grocer at the Co-op but in his spare time he used to make Eric toys. Some of them were still around when I was growing up and they were really rather good.”
Despite having no formal art training – indeed Eric left school with no formal qualifications at all – by the time he was in his teens he owned a set of watercolours and was painting.
“At 14 he took up boxing in the boxing club above the Raven {a former pub in Fennel Street, Warrington} and I recall seeing some super portraits he’d done of famous boxers,” remembered Tony.
Despite briefly turning professional (fighting under the pseudonym Jimmy Flowers), Eric’s main passion was art. “The true extent of this only really came to light after we lost him in 2018 aged 86,” said Tony.
The title of a 2019 retrospective exhibition at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery “Eric Tucker: The Unseen Artist” was the first time there had been a significant public exhibition of the artist’s work. It came after Tony discovered, when sorting through his house, that there were drawings and paintings everywhere: “We knew Eric painted and that he was very good but the hidden treasures we uncovered were something else. We had no idea how prolific he’d become – the breath and depth of his work was astonishing.”
After hearing Eric say towards the end of his life he was disappointed there’d never been a local exhibition of his work his family set about making it happen. Before they emptied Eric’s house they hung some of his paintings on its walls and made plans to open it up so his friends and neighbours – many of whom didn’t even know he painted – could see some of the artwork he’d produced.
And that’s when momentum took hold – the story was shared with the local press, then the National press and soon there was international interest in ‘Warrington’s Secret Lowry”.
By the time Eric’s home was opened to the public on a damp weekend in 2018, people were queuing around the block.
“It was phenomenal, ” remembered Tony. “And the success of that weekend eventually led to Eric’s larger exhibition in Warrington Museum. The most satisfying thing of all though was the reception Eric’s paintings got – people loved them.”
For a man who only sold two paintings in his lifetime the response was indeed astonishing. Today his original paintings can fetch in excess of £10,000.
But what about the man himself? What was Eric Tucker’s life like between 1932 and 2018? What inspired him, what and who were his influences, what was his personality like, how did he work?
Unassuming but highly intelligent
“My brother was a very unassuming man and although he only received a basic education he was very intelligent,” said Tony. “Similarly with his art, he was self-taught but very accomplished.”
Eric’s first job on leaving school was actually art related.
“He was apprenticed as a sign writer but didn’t stick at it for long” said Tony. “I’ve no idea why but after that he took on a variety of jobs. He was a steelworker for a year in Wales, a gravedigger, a brewery and lumberyard worker and finally a labourer at a local building firm. All but his steelworking job were in Warrington although he did spend some time in Germany doing his National Service.”
“My brother didn’t like the army very much,” added Tony, “Probably because he didn’t like authority figures. He was fiercely working class and didn’t like the way some things in life worked. For example, whilst he was alive he only had his work exhibited once on a very small scale in a Manchester Gallery in the 1980s. Whilst there he sold two out of the three paintings he had on display but the gallery didn’t want to take any more, plus Eric didn’t like the fact the gallery took 35% commission. He took umbrage at that, thought it was unfair and shied away from doing any more.”
If the experience knocked Eric’s confidence it did not impact on the quality of his work, or his output, as he continued to produce a succession of quality paintings, most of them featuring Warrington people and landmarks.
One of Eric Tucker’s many paintings depicting the people and places of Warrington, in this example it’s a crowd of shoppers at the foot of Butttermarket Street on a canvas entitled ‘Ready for Christmas’.
“My brother never married and had no children so I guess as he lived in the same house as my mother he had a lot of time to be creative. He would often sketch things that caught his eye on a piece of paper. In pubs for example he would draw what he saw slightly under the table so as not to be seen. Some of these scraps would then be worked into bigger paintings back home.”
I asked Tony what he thought about the parallels drawn between Eric’s and Lowry’s work. “I can understand people saying Eric’s paintings were in the ‘Lowry Tradition’ because of the type of scenes they captured and there were definite similarities in the way they worked. Like Lowry for example Eric always painted over a white base layer. But the big difference to me is that Lowry, who was a rent collector, was an outsider looking in. Eric was on the inside. He was one of those people Lowry painted. He was in those buildings, he walked those streets, he could easily have been one of Lowry’s matchstalk men.
“Eric loved going into pubs, both in Warrington and in some of its surrounding areas too. He was at home in them. He was a gambler too, he gambled every day. He was a typical working class man doing working class things but as an artist he was blessed with an exceptional talent.”
Unlike Lowry’s paintings, the most notable of which could be described as being dull and dour in colour, some of Eric’s paintings featured vibrant colours, especially his circus and clown paintings.
“Eric loved the circus and something about clowns fascinated him,” said his brother Tony.
It’s fair to say Tony Tucker’s commitment to getting his brother’s work recognised has been a success – as well as Warrington, two exhibitions of his work have since taken place in London.
But what else could Tony have done? It would have been a travesty if Eric Tucker’s paintings had been consigned to an attic gathering dust. His snapshots of Warrington needed to be seen; they had to be seen and hat’s off to Tony for allowing us, and the world, to see them.
I will leave it to Tony to sum up his brother’s talent and legacy using the words he read on air at the end of a Radio Warrington interview in 2021.
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, Eric’s brother