This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism

‘Beautifully written… A book I have always hoped someone would write’ Nigel Slater

Jim Ede was a man of remarkable energy and vision: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. As Laura Freeman shows in this captivating biography, the lives of Ede and the artists he championed represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art.

At Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. Art ca be found there wherever you look – in a pebble, feather or seedhead. His approach has shown generations of visitors that learning to look can be a whole new way of life.

‘A beautiful, original biography… Freeman’s writing has Ede’s flair, grace and insight’ Financial Times

‘A cabinet of curiosities… The story of a life and of a century’ London Review of Books

"A captivating biography" - House & Garden

"If ever the spirit of a gallery is captured within hard covers, it is Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, in this beautiful, original biography of its founder... Freeman's writing has Ede's flair, grace and insight" - Financial Times, *Best Books of 2023*

"An impassioned biography" - The Times, *Top 50 Non-Fiction Books*

"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

"Freeman has done a wonderful job here in conveying with absolute precision why Ede mattered and what made him different from his Bloomsbury contemporaries" - Sunday Times

"A thorough and entertaining biography... Excellently paced" - The Times

"Meticulously researched, sympathetically told, the book is infused with the spirit of Kettle's Yard" - i

"Laura Freeman has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated" - Spectator