This beautifully written tribute to the author’s uncle Eric, whose death revealed hundreds of hidden paintings, serves as a northern corrective to the metropolitan art world

“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.

But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.

Works created in hospital after ear mutilation incident to be shown at Courtauld Gallery next month

Two Vincent van Gogh paintings created in the months after the Dutch artist mutilated his ear will be exhibited in London for the first time.

The works, The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles and The Ward in the Hospital at Arles, would appear at the Courtauld Gallery from next month, the Art Newspaper reported.

Striking image will be unveiled at National Portrait Gallery in March, as part of a major exhibition of the Norwegian master’s portraits

At first glance, it is a striking portrait by Edvard Munch, painted in 1892, a year before the Norwegian master was to create his most famous masterpiece, The Scream.

But peer closely at the man’s sleeve along the bottom edge and two embracing, ethereal figures in a mysterious moonlit landscape are revealed.