'Unseen Artist' Eric Tucker Spent Decades Painting — But Nobody Knew

"Eric Tucker's paintings have an effect on people. You can see it in their expressions as they stroll through a new exhibition, Eric Tucker: The Unseen Artist, at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery."

"'Happy. Really happy,' says Cris Bury. 'He's got the character straightaway.'"

"'I'm wandering round here with a smile on me face because I just think they're wonderful,' says Phil Lord. And Colin Okell adds, 'A lot of them depict a society that's gone.'"

"Bury is a retired teacher who's lived in this former industrial town in northwest England for four decades. She didn't know about Tucker. 'Nobody did until he died,' she says. 'And that's when it was discovered.'"

"Tucker was a boxer and construction worker in Warrington. And though few knew it, he was also a prolific, self-taught artist whose paintings depicted a lost, industrial era. Before he died in 2018 at the age of 86, family members discovered a trove of about 400 canvases, the best of which are now on display here."

"Tucker spent his days in the front parlor of his home, painting the working-class world he knew: Boisterous pubs where people played piano and sang. Neighborhoods of terraced houses — the English equivalent of row homes — where men played cricket in empty lots against a skyline of belching smokestacks. It was a communal way of life that disappeared with Warrington's factories."