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 as a 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. 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 was diffident and unforthcoming about his art – even close family were unaware of the scale of his output until the end of his life. His work eventually came to public attention following his death in 2018, when his family opened his house as a free gallery, attracting thousands of visitors and national press coverage.
Praise for the work of Eric Tucker
‘The collection is a remarkable, important find… I think he falls into the English surrealist movement.... His work might be tied with Julian Trevelyan or Eric Ravilious.’
Ruth Millington, art historian, critic & writer‘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… 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.’
Robin Simon, art historian & critic, editor of The British Art Journal‘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.’
Elise Bell, arts writer & commentator‘Now that his art has at last been rescued from undeserved obscurity, it enables us to share a whole range of vividly defined emotions and experiences at the very heart of northern working-class life.’
Richard Cork, art historian, critic, broadcaster & curator‘His masterpieces are his pub interiors… Tucker works pictorial magic with pub tables, arranging them like stepping stones into the distance and fixing them in position with bottles of stout. He has a sophisticated sense of design: he likes playing abstract games with circles and squares.’
Laura Gascoigne, art critic, The Spectator‘[Tucker’s] work is being taken seriously at last.’
Jonathan Jones, art critic, The Guardian