On 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. 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.
Ede 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”. 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 set to work making every corner of his Kettle’s Yard gallery a still life. For nearly 20 years he and his wife, Helen, welcomed the curious into their home. 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. He encouraged students to borrow original pieces to decorate undergraduate walls. 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.
