Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

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He [Jim Ede] left this house that people still make a pilgrimage to. I think we don’t necessarily die, so long as the books, the art, the places we create go on living” – Laura Freeman Jim had a gift for arranging rooms but somehow also for arranging people and putting odd juxtapositions of people together, and then somehow sort of facilitating conversation and helping them get along,” says Laura. Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists, by Laura Freeman.

I think sometimes we over-prioritise romantic love and diminish the importance of the love that comes from companionship. I think they absolutely have that. It’s funny actually. When I was writing the book I remembered when Prince Philip died and they kept playing that quote from the Queen saying, ‘he was my strength and stay’. And I think for Jim I think Helen was his strength and stay. I think he was sometimes prone to flights of fancy. And she was incredibly steady. And was a kind of anchor for him.”

An excellent biography of Jim Ede. Reading Laura Freeman's luminous study of the curator and collector, I can't help but picture the gallery and house he built - the haven of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge Daily Telegraph An excellent biography of Jim Ede. Reading Laura Freeman's luminous study of the curator and collector, I can't help but picture the gallery and house he built - the haven of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge * Daily Telegraph * He goes to Amsterdam. He meets the widow of the widow of Van Gogh’s brother, and she says we’ll go upstairs to the attic and have a rummage,” explains Laura. MB: This is clearly a book with a huge depth of research behind it. How did you even begin to approach that? Asked about his experiences in the first world war, Ede told people to read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of An Infantry Officer because his own memories were not much different. His own war led him from the western front to Cambridge. As an officer in the trenches he was no coward, yet the stress and filth gave him such severe gut trouble he was invalided home and sent to teach student soldiers by the River Cam. Ede never went to university but his wartime dinners with dons made him fall in love with this rural-academic town where eventually, in the 1950s, he would buy Kettle’s Yard to house his collection.

Freeman documents their long lives in fabulous detail. Some of her source material is an unpublished memoir Ede wrote in his 80s; some comes from the compulsive letters he wrote to TE Lawrence – whom he befriended through the Tate – and Jones, and the Nicholsons and the self-taught Cornish artist Alfred Wallis, who Ede helped make an art-world star. The gaps are filled with interviews with surviving friends and relatives, undergraduate visitors to Kettle’s Yard – everyone from Edmund de Waal to Nicholas Serota. Ede had pivotal walk-on roles in many more famous lives; the visitors’ book at his grand, unaffordable house in Hampstead records wonderful dinners and parties with Henry Moore and Graham Greene and Edith Evans and John Gielgud and Vanessa Bell. Here, he is given centre stage. Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times. She has written for the Spectator, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, Apollo and World of Interiors. Her first book The Reading Cure, a memoir about hunger and happiness, addiction, obsession and recovery, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. She studied history of art at Magdalene College, Cambridge.Helen Ede was a good piano player, although she was very modest, to entertain them. They never really had much money. The joke that used to go around was that you had better eat dinner before you go up to the Edes’ because you only get two strawberries or two berries on a plate. And Jim said that they could never really afford to give them proper wine so they would serve ginger wine. But I would have liked to have been at those parties. That would have been good fun.” For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked – in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Sassoon’s vivid descriptions of eggs on buttered toast, and hot chocolate, made her think that there was “a different way of eating … one that was less mean and more adventurous”. Encouraged by this notion, she began to hunt down other authors who wrote vividly about food.

I lived in Hampstead for 60 years and overlapped this with much time in St Ives, Cornwall. Jim lived up the road from me for some of this time So too did his artist friends. Unsurprising therefore that Jim's aesthetic tastes are like mine.In this first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists, Laura Freeman reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists.

He was in the trenches in the First World War, where he ends up with trench gastritis, stomach problems and jaundice, and he gets invalided out and he’s sent to a hospital in France, having been in a field hospital,” she says.

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Among the paintings was Van Gogh’s most famous work, Sunflowers. “They did buy some of them but Britain would have a much much better collection of Van Goghs had they listened to Jim.” He was in late middle age by the time he and Helen found the cottages that became Kettle’s Yard. But when he was young he was fun. He was a dandy, he was a man about town. He knew everyone there was to know in literary and artistic London in the roaring 20s. And the more I found about him, the more I realised how kind of contradictory he was, because I think the impression you get from Kettle’s Yard is of someone calm, serene, at ease with the world. And he wasn’t. I think he was a rather complicated, tortured, troubled soul in many ways.” Kettle's Yard: Jim's bedroom. Picture: Paul Allitt Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity