Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What to do? If he or she has a dealer, they will drip-feed work on to the market with varying degrees of success. If the artist is famous there’s no problem; any unsold work will be fought over. If middlingly successful, shifting it can be a slog. But if unsuccessful — better still, completely unknown — the equation changes. When the art market discovers a ‘secret artist’, their estate acquires the cachet of a hoard.
Such a hoard came to light three years ago in the Warrington home of former boxer, unskilled labourer and sometime gravedigger Eric Tucker. On his death aged 86 in July 2018 Tucker’s family found his end-of-terrace council house crammed with 400 paintings, piled on beds, on top of wardrobes, in the loft, the shed, the airing cupboard, under the stairs. His relatives were astonished. They knew he painted but had no idea how much, or how well.
A woman visitor to his first exhibition was reduced to tears, remembering: ‘This is the world I knew’
In the manner of its discovery, Tucker’s art came full circle: the first drawings his younger brother Tony remembers him making were on the walls of the cupboard under his grandmother’s stairs during air raids. After taking up boxing as a teenager he drew portraits of famous fighters, but in adulthood he kept his habit to himself. Sharing the family home with his mother until her death aged 90 — he never married — made this possible. He sold two paintings when his brother persuaded him to take them to a Manchester gallery but never took any more, affronted that they took a commission.‘My brother was one of life’s irregulars,’ says Tony.
If his domestic situation reminds one of L.S.
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