House Guide sample

In a 1956 letter to David Jones, Jim Ede wrote that: “it would be interesting to be lent a great house on the verge of a city – or a place of beauty in a town (Cambridge I have in mind) and make it all that I could of lived in beauty, each room an atmosphere of quiet and simple charm, and open to the public (in Cambridge to students especially) and for such a living creation I would give all that I have in pictures and lovely objects, would bear the initial cost of making the house suitable, give my services for the next 10 years … Helen and I would live in a bit of it. The rest would look lived in, and its special feature would be I think one of simplicity and loved qualities. There could be a library there (art perhaps) and there could be evenings of chamber music.”

In Ede’s vision, this was to be: “a living place where works of art would be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality.”

Ede wanted a ‘great’ building to house his creation, but at the time none was available in Cambridge, where he and Helen had chosen to settle. The search for a suitable home for the couple and the collection continued until they found the four derelict cottages of ‘Kettle’s Yard’. With the help of local architect Roland Aldridge, Jim restored and remodelled the cottages and moved in with Helen in 1957.

The house was ready to receive visitors by the end of the year. Ede installed the collection of art, furniture, glass, ceramics and other objects he had gathered during his peripatetic life. By weighing and assessing the position of each work of art and object, and their relationship with each other, he aimed at creating a perfectly balanced whole, which would become almost a work of art in its own right. The notion of balance was central to Ede’s vision, as he extensively documented in his book A Way of Life (1984), the detailed and itself scrupulously assembled story of the genesis of Kettle's Yard. Ede regarded all the disciplines he had an interest in – namely art, music, religion as well as the organisation of domestic spaces – as very closely related, because all were governed by balance, which he regarded as an almost divine equivalent. Tellingly, he viewed the arrangement of Kettle’s Yard as similar to the composition of a piece of music - each part significant on its own, but much more important in terms of its contribution to the whole arrangement.

Although Ede never had much money to spend and often had to acquire works by exchange or through the generosity of his artist friends, his collection was of outstanding quality and importance. As well as the Gaudier-Brzeska estate, which formed the backbone of the collection, he had then the most substantial publicly accessible holding of early works by Ben and Winifred Nicholson and paintings by Christopher Wood.

Moreover, the display of his Alfred Wallis paintings helped establish the painter’s place in the history of art, as until then only a few individuals had 9