James Walker Tucker (1898–1972) was born in Wallsend, near Newcastle, in Northumberland. He studied first at Armstrong College in Newcastle, and then at the Royal College of Art, London (1922–7). Here he was taught by Sir William Rothenstein, before becoming Rothenstein’s personal studio assistant. Tucker won a travelling scholarship to Italy, and on his return he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Laing Art Gallery. Exhibitions at the Royal Academy followed, and also at the New English Art Club. He went on to become Head of Drawing and Painting at Gloucester College of Art (1931) where he taught until his retirement in 1963.
Tucker is an artist who represents a neglected era in British Art: Realist painting between the two World Wars. Along with artists of the 1920s and 1930s such as Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Meredith Frampton, Winifred Knights, Harold Williamson and James Cowie, Tucker eschewed abstraction and worked in a realist manner—precise, hard-edged and graphic, and with minimal narrative detail, as opposed to loose and painterly. Hugely respected and selling for vast sums in their time, after World War II these artists fell out of favour, eclipsed by the rise of abstraction and Pop Art.
