So far this year, the Mayfair gallery owner Alon Zakaim has exhibited works by Damien Hirst, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Yet none has aroused interest to match that in the work of an unskilled labourer from Warrington, Cheshire, who died three years ago, an unknown in the art world.
Some 40 watercolours and oil paintings by Eric Tucker, the “secret painter”, are on display at two London galleries, Alon Zakaim Fine Art and Connaught Brown. Only after he died aged 86 did his family discover more than 400 paintings at his end-of-terrace former council house. They depicted scenes from the pubs, working men’s clubs and streets he knew well in the north of England.
Within two days of the works going on display early last month, about 80 per cent had been sold. This weekend, just two of the 40 works remain.
“By volume and sheer speed of sales this is unprecedented,” Zakaim, 52, said.
Anthony Brown, managing director of Connaught Brown, said his staff “couldn’t cope with the calls”. People who were unable to buy their own Tucker had been offering sizeable sums to those who had, he added.
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Buyers have come from as far afield as America, Australia and Malaysia, though Brown said all had some connection to the north of England. One buyer proposed to his wife in Warrington.
With watercolours from £1,500 and oil paintings costing up to £14,000, it is likely that Tucker’s work has generated more money in the past month than he might have earned in his lifetime.
Tucker left school aged 14 and after a brief stint as a professional boxer he worked in itinerant jobs, such as signwriter’s apprentice. He helped to construct the Llanwern steelworks in south Wales and worked as a gravedigger — giving up, his brother Tony said, because he was upset at having to bury a child. He later became a building site labourer.
Tucker never married or had children, and lived in the terraced house where he grew up with his mother, Joan Urey, until her death in 2008. His father, also Eric Tucker, had died at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.
He was a hoarder of art books — admiring Degas and Toulouse Lautrec — and an avid reader of The Sunday Times Culture section. But although his family knew he was a keen self-taught painter — he would occasionally give artworks as birthday presents — they had no idea how prolific he had been until a few months before his death, when he asked Tony to help him put on an exhibition at his local art gallery. They were not able to catalogue all of the works before Tucker, who had a form of arthritis and a degenerative heart condition, died in July 2018.
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Hundreds more works were discovered in the parlour, bedrooms, cupboards and even an old air raid shelter. His nephew Joe, 39, a comedy screenwriter, said: “It was only after he died and seeing the work I reframed him: this was the main thing in his life. A lot of things about his life and personality suddenly made sense.”
Tucker was hailed in the tabloids as the “secret Lowry” for his depictions of working-class life in the north of England.
Tony, 79, said his brother would carry around scraps of paper and sketch surreptitiously under the table.
However, unlike Lowry’s matchstick men, Tucker’s paintings are full of warmth. Brown said: “With Lowry you seldom get the character, he gets the atmosphere in the street. When you look at the bar scenes by Tucker, they are his friends. You can hear the chat and smell the smoke.”
Tucker once met Lowry at a gallery and remembered the celebrated artist telling him: “I’ve never worked, you know.” Lowry tried to hide his past before his art was recognised — including a stint as a debt collector — but Tucker hid his life as an artist as he felt like an outsider. “I think a lot of it came down to where he saw himself in the world,” Joe said.
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“He was an uneducated, working-class guy. To him, the art world was middle-class. He didn’t really have a bank account. Banks, to him, were a middle-class thing and he didn’t really trust them. It was the same with his art. He just lived in a different world to that kind of stuff. He didn’t feel comfortable and in control.”
Unable to secure gallery space at first, Tucker’s family opened his house in King George Crescent to display the paintings where they had been created over the decades. It drew more than 2,000 people over a weekend in October 2018. A year later, they were shown at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery in The Unseen Artist, one of the gallery’s most popular exhibitions in its 144-year history.
In the 1980s Tucker dipped a toe into the art market in Manchester but was put off by the dealers’ terms. “The commission was maybe 30 or 35 per cent,” Tony recalled. “My brother said: ‘Bloody hell, I do all the work.’ I said: ‘Seventy per cent of something is better than 100 per cent of nothing.’ But my brother didn’t buy into that.”
The pair also drove to London twice to enter Tucker’s works in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, without success. Tucker did, however, win a painting competition in Warrington in 1995, reluctantly entering his work, Ready for Christmas, at his family’s behest.
Brown and Zakaim believe the market for Tucker’s work will go “from strength to strength” with hundreds of paintings remaining in the collection. The family’s joy at the success of the exhibition is tinged with sadness, however. “I would have loved to have seen his face,” said Tony. “He would have laughed at the idea of his work being shown in Mayfair.”
