Ways of Life

''The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle''s Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it'' - Edmund de Waal

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

The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle''s Yard artists 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.

The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.

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, deal