Eric Tucker – the uncle of this book's author, Joe Tucker – was a labourer from Warrington, Lancashire.
A bachelor who spent decades living with his mother, he "cultivated a dishevelled look", said Houman Barekat in The Guardian: he wore a "faded bomber jacket held together by sticky tape" and used a rope to hold up his trousers. Although generally solitary, he could be sociable, and "enjoyed carousing in disreputable drinking dens".
And he harboured a secret. When he died, aged 84, in 2018, his nephew Joe, a screenwriter, discovered more than 500 paintings in the attic of his council house. Joe knew his uncle painted "in his spare time", but was still astonished by what he found. Eric's "vignettes of working-class life" – scenes from pubs (such as Two Smokers, pictured), theatres and nightclubs; portraits of pigeon fanciers, carnival workers and down-and-outs – struck Joe as evidence of a serious talent. In The Secret Painter, he "unpacks the eccentric life behind this remarkable story". The result is a "tenderly affectionate, witty and touching" memoir – and a "fitting tribute to its subject".
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