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Kettle's Yard House: Open House
Green Pebble April/May 2010 issue

Kettle's Yard House, next door to Kettle’s Yard Gallery on Castle Hill, Cambridge, is an oddity; neither museum nor art gallery. Its founder Jim Ede, writing in 1970, said it represented, ‘a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognise if we are not to be swamped by all that is so rapidly opening up before us.’

Jim Ede’s statement sounds like a huge claim and he went on to say, ‘I hope that future generations will still find a home and a welcome, a refuge of peace and order, of the visual arts and of music.’ However, despite the apparent extravagance of his claim, that is precisely what is happening on the edge of Cambridge at this exceptional place.

Jim had been an assistant at the Tate in the mid-1920s when he met Ben and Winifred Nicholson and began buying some of the paintings Ben Nicholson could not sell, paying as little as one pound for them.

After some time abroad in the 1930s and ‘40s Jim began to dream of ‘creating a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting’ and, having grown up in Cambridge he began to scour the area for suitable premises, finally coming across four derelict cottages on Honey Hill, recommended to him by the President of the Cambridge Preservation Society. He bought these and, with the help of a local architect, renovated the cottages, moving into them with his wife and his art collection in 1957.

Impeccable taste
This was no ordinary personal collection of peripheral art objects, however, for Jim Ede had become known through his collecting and lecturing as a well-connected man of impeccable taste. He had acquired, in addition to 44 of Nicholson’s paintings, almost the entire contents of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s studio after the artist was killed in the First World War and had made friends with many of the period’s key artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Miró and Brancusi.

Today the Kettle's Yard House Guide lists 274 works of art, even though the Gaudier-Brzeska drawings in the attic, which number about 40 in all, are not listed individually.

When you walk into the extension at the upper level you first see a sculpture that is unmistakeably Henry Moore sitting opposite a wall of paintings including an Eric Gill, a few Italo Valentis, a couple of Ben Nicholsons and a Georges Braque. In a partially separated area to the right of these, in the open plan, sky-lit extension, is one of Gaudier-Brzeska’s most famous sculptures, Bird Swallowing a Fish, alongside a Lowry, more Nicholsons and a couple of Christopher Woods. This eclectic mixing of painting, sculpture and occasionally native objects continues throughout the house, even in the bedrooms and bathrooms. Yet, despite the amount of artwork, there is no feeling of clutter. Instead, there is a feeling of being cosseted by the works...

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Kettle's Yard House Opening Times
Winter opening
Tuesday-Sunday
and Bank Holiday Mondays 2-4pm
CLOSED 24-28 December, 1 January.
Summer opening
(2009: 4 April- 27 September)
Tuesday-Sunday
and Bank Holiday Mondays 1.30-4.30pm
closed Good Friday (10 April 2009)
GALLERY & BOOKSHOP open
Tuesday-Sunday
and Bank Holiday Mondays 11.30am-5.00pm
CLOSED 24-28 December, 1 January.
closed Good Friday (10 April 2009)
Note: the gallery & bookshop are closed during the installation of exhibitions

For more information, visit Kettle's Yard House

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Kettle's Yard House: Open House Green Pebble April/May 2010 issue

Kettle's Yard House: Open House
Green Pebble April/May 2010 issue