The Secret Painter
Joe Tucker
Available as Hardback
30 January 2025
A true story about class and ambition, loneliness and community, success and failure; told with real heart and humour it reminds us that the extraordinary can be found in the most unexpected places
Joe Tucker’s Uncle Eric was a beloved yet unconventional figure throughout Joe’s life. A shambolically dressed man who lived with his mother for almost eighty years, he had an almost compulsive need to charm strangers with working men’s club comedy routines, and appeared to exist only for daily trips to the bookie – and yet had also amassed over five hundred of his own remarkable paintings without anyone ever realising his achievements.
Towards the end of his life, Eric requested an exhibition of his work. As Joe and his family sorted through hundreds of paintings of street scenes, circus and theatre performers, and busy pubs, they began to ask more questions about Eric’s life: why had this fanatically sociable man never left his mother’s home? Had Eric ever experienced love when he painted it so beautifully? And what had driven him to create so much, yet share it so rarely?
In this touching, funny and thoughtful investigation of the nature of expression, the ownership of art and the secret life of those nearest to us, Joe Tucker brings us into his uncle’s extraordinary and compelling world. Perhaps more importantly, he also brings Eric Tucker’s life’s work into ours.
“Joe Tucker is a natural storyteller and The Secret Painter is a brilliant, engrossing read. Tucker discovers and uncovers a rich and fascinating tale hidden in his own family. What he finds, and how he acts upon it, will change their world forever, and his book serves as an important reminder to all of us that the great stories in our lives are often closer to us than we think”
Lemn Sissay
See more reviews
”Praise for Eric Tucker’s work: ‘Tucker’s paintings are full of warmth”
the Times
“Tucker’s work isn’t just romantic in its mystery, but significant to British art as a whole. The man represents a cultural movement, encapsulating a too often ignored group of painters who studied a life hidden from London’s social scene”
inews
“Tucker’s subjects ooze character”
npr
“The collection is a remarkable, important find. Northern artists are so often written out of history”
Ruth Millington
Joe Tucker
Joe Tucker originally trained as an animation director before becoming a television scriptwriter. With his scriptwriting partner, Lloyd Woolf, he has created and written the BBC shows Witless, Click & Collect and Black Ops.