Jim Ede started early. At the age of 12 he used £8 of his hard-won savings to buy a Queen Anne desk. No bicycle, air pistol or football for him: this solid piece of old furniture was the thing, the first step in a long life of acquiring objects that lived, breathed and spoke to him. To call him a compulsive collector is to understate the passion that over the years saw the desk followed by an avalanche of stuff, from porcelain and glasses to pebbles and feathers, textiles and above all paintings, drawings and sculpture. Each acquisition admired, loved, cherished and shared for its uniqueness – what Gerard Manley Hopkins would have called its ‘instress’.

Beyond the things, Ede also collected people – painters, sculptors, other collectors, students, servicemen – and houses.  In Hampstead, in Tangier, and above all at his Kettle’s Yard home in Cambridge, he arranged his collections and entertained people in exquisite spaces. Ways of Life is the many-stranded story of Ede’s life and of the lives of the artists most closely associated with him.

Ede was born in 1895, the son of a solicitor father and a Welsh Wesleyan mother who taught classics. His rather disjointed education included a spell in France, a short stay at the Leys in Cambridge, a term or two at Newlyn College of Art and another at Edinburgh, before he was engulfed by the first world war. Serving as an officer with the South Wales Borderers on the Ypres Salient, he was gassed, shelled and witnessed all the horrors the Western Front had to offer until he was invalided out with trench gastritis and neurasthenia, complaints which would trouble him for the rest of his life.

After the war, it took another spell at art school – the Slade this time – to bring home to Ede that he was no artist. Art school in Edinburgh had, however, given him a wife in the form of his fellow student Helen Schlapp, to whom he was married from 1921 until her death in 1977. A somewhat chaotic family life – there were two daughters – ensued.

Despite a wealth of affection, it would be hard to describe Ede as a family man, and as much as the homes he created loom large in his biography, there was no seamless domestic life in them. He would often abandon wife and children for his alternative ‘homes’, Little Compton Manor, or the Keep at Bamburgh Castle, and, as Laura Freeman puts it, his ‘romantic attachments’ throughout a long, happy but largely platonic marriage would be to men, such as the young American sculptor Richard Pousette-Dart or T.E. Lawrence. He ‘never liked labels’, Freeman writes with the sensitive understanding characteristic of this excellent book,

he did not like them on paintings and he did not like them on people. There are none at Kettle’s Yard. To call Jim gay or queer or bisexual or homosexual is to impose words he would not have used of himself. The word he understood, and the one he used most often, was ‘love’. By love he meant something like yearning, kindredness, a communion of like-minded spirits and a great desire to help and console. With Lawrence, he had felt this intensely. There were times in Jim’s life, though, when the constraints on loving and touching and embracing were a very real grief to him. He imagined a time when men might embrace without fear, like the saints in Fra Angelico’s painted Paradise. ‘This is not possible on Earth,’ he wrote, ‘& so I try to live (long to live) in Heaven!’

If art school had not been for him, then the art world was another matter, and in looking, talking and writing about art, in identifying and championing artists, both the man and the aesthete in Ede discovered a natural milieu. The day job, though, as a curator at the Tate Gallery from the early 1920s until 1936, he found intensely frustrating. Six Van Goghs for £5,000? Not a flicker of interest from the establishment. A Brancusi exhibition? Certainly not. Picasso? That enfant terrible!

But into the day job Ede poured only a part of his energy. Lectures, talks for the BBC, articles, reviews, the Contemporary Art Society and above all meetings with artists were the meat and drink of his existence. In Paris he dined with Picasso, had coffee with Joan Miró, haunted Brancusi’s studio, met Marc Chagall and Naum Gabo, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. But the living artists closest to his heart, and who feature most prominently in this book, are British. Ben Nicholson and his first wife Winifred; his second wife Barbara Hepworth; the St Ives fisherman and naive painter Alfred Wallis; Christopher Wood and the brilliant, troubled David Jones. These artists, all names to conjure with in the saleroom today, were supported, intellectually, emotionally and financially, and promoted by Ede throughout his life – an association inevitably reflected in his collections.

There, too, can be found a large body of work by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French modernist sculptor killed at Neuville-St Vaast in 1915. A decade after his death, his entire estate landed on Ede’s desk at the Tate. The gallery selected three sculptures and 17 drawings, but in common with the art world at the time, had no interest in the bulk of the work. In somewhat dubious circumstances Ede acquired it, and to some extent it underpinned much of his success in later life. Savage Messiah, his biography of Henri Gaudier and his lover Sophie Brzeska, was Ede’s only commercially successful publication (and was made into a film by Ken Russell) and the sale of drawings and bronzes plugged many a hole in the leaky structure of Ede’s finances.

In 1936 Ede left the Tate, frustrated and angered that his efforts to connect the gallery with all that was best in contemporary art largely fell on deaf ears. For the remainder of his long life he continued his advocacy of artists, cobbling together a career of lecturing, writing and acquisition. The display of his collection was always of primary importance, and through his years of contact with influential gallery owners and other collectors he developed an acute aesthetic of his own.

At first in the family home in Hampstead, subsequently in the house he had built in Tangier and finally at the four cottages that make up Kettle’s Yard, gifted to the University of Cambridge during Ede’s lifetime, he created a matchless environment where his ‘stuff’ could be seen in the best possible setting. Here his Ben Nicholsons and David Joneses, his Alfred Wallises and his Henry Moore, his Barbara Hepworth, his Winifred Nicholson cyclamens and his Gaudiers rhymed and reverberated with pewter plates and glass goblets, fossils, feathers, pebbles, fruit and flowers.

Ever generous with his time, expertise and money (in Tangier he and Helen hosted tired servicemen from Gibraltar every weekend for nearly two years), it was also at Kettle’s Yard that his proselytising found its ultimate fulfilment. Every afternoon in term time between 1958 and 1973 Ede would welcome students there, show them around and give them tea; he would even lend them works of art for the rest of the term. Students of all kinds remember these afternoons as hugely important episodes in their lives.

Freeman is too young to have been one of those students, but she was taught by one, and throughout this book you feel that she would dearly have liked to be one herself. She has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated with objects from the collection headlining each section.

Ede was no saint and this is no hagiography, but Freeman tells the story of his life with understanding and sympathy for both the man and the art. For many people – me included – Kettle’s Yard is the best that an art gallery can be: its spaces, its light, its paintings, drawings, furniture and objets trouvés deliver an experience that stays long in the mind, and this book is a worthy companion to that experience.