Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Laura Freeman author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Publishing:18th Sep '25

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 18th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Ways of Life cover

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 *
Beautifully written... A book I have always hoped someone would write. -- Nigel Slater
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 *
Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty -- Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity
Laura Freeman has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated * Spectator *

ISBN: 9781529932317

Dimensions: 196mm x 129mm x 32mm

Weight: 440g

496 pages