![]() Photograph: Paul Allittįreeman documents their long lives in fabulous detail. ‘A place of beauty’: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, showing a Buddha from Thailand (13th or 14th century) and works by Mario Sironi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson. At Kettle’s Yard they had separate bedrooms, connected by a speaking tube. In this spirit, he and Helen first set up home in Hampstead with their two daughters, then moved to a modernist house Ede built in Tangier in the 1930s, then led a wandering life out of a Buick in the US during the war as Ede lectured on art at universities to support relief funds back home, then bought an idyllic cottage in the Loire valley, before settling in Cambridge. “No,” she sighed, “he’s an art student.” The point of art, Ede insisted, “was not to make maps but to adventure”. ![]() When they married he looked so “young and flustered” that the registrar at Chelsea asked Helen if her betrothed was a minor. “When Jim was 12,” Freeman writes, “when all the boys were buying the bicycles that were all the Edwardian rage, he bought a Queen Anne desk for £8.” A sensitive child of middle-class Methodist parents – his father was a Cambridge-educated solicitor with a practice in Cardiff – he was both nearly destroyed and saved by the first world war.Įde never thought not to join up – though how could he, “who believed in love, friendship, art and beauty” and who was enthralled by Helen Schlapp, beautiful daughter of a German professor? His ordeal in the trenches, however, meant at least that his stern parents would indulge his desire to lead an unconventional life: he might be a bohemian, they reasoned, but at least he was alive.įreeman intimates a life of unspoken homosexual desire in Ede. In the great flood at the Tate in 1928, Ede was up to his waist in water trying to save the Turner seascapesĪt the heart of it, and from the beginning, Ede cuts a singular figure. Ede thought of his paintings and sculptures as favourite house guests, and the reader of this book might well come to imagine them in that way too. Freeman, chief art critic at the Time s, writes with an exact enthusiasm about the things she describes. Each of her chapters begins with a picture of a Kettle’s Yard treasure and takes flight from there. Laura Freeman’s biography of Ede is in part a life of the objects that he collected and the stories they tell. Visitors were invited to sit down at the kitchen table with Jim and Helen for tea in china cups and hot buttered toast with marmalade cold from the fridge. He encouraged students to borrow original pieces to decorate undergraduate walls. Ede, who died in 1990 aged 95, gave personal tours of the paintings and sculptures and the favourite found objects – pebbles and feathers and shells. For nearly 20 years he and his wife, Helen, welcomed the curious into their home. Ede set to work making every corner of his Kettle’s Yard gallery a still life. ![]() It took him the best part of that year to find and buy four semi-derelict cottages just over Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge, once home to a playhouse owned by a Mr Joseph Kettle. Ede, who had been a curator at the Tate Gallery before the second world war, and a pioneering collector of the art of his friends and heroes – Jones, and the St Ives group of painters, and Miró and Brancusi – outlined in that letter an impulse to create a modest and lasting monument to what he had learned about art and about life.Įde had in mind, he wrote, “a place of beauty in a town”, a home that would be open to students and to the public and allow him to share “all that I have in pictures and lovely objects”. O n New Year’s Day 1956, Jim Ede, then 60, wrote to his friend, the painter and poet David Jones, of a “quixotic scheme” he had for the remaining years of his life.
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