The Gentle Artist
Until October 30; Tweeddale Museum, Chambers Institute, Peebles

Edward Eade never had a solo show in his life. Twenty years after his death, he’s got his third. Taught at art school by Roger Fry, and later on in life by Henry Moore, Eade was a painter and sculptor who preferred to sellotape Van Gogh and Monet prints to the walls of his Hampstead home than to let his own out of hiding.

After discovering what’s left of Eade’s work, his son is on a one-man crusade to show it to the world. This sizeable exhibition is a pleasant distraction, but if it was hung chronologically, you couldn’t fail to see how the artist’s initial intensity peeled away through the course of his life.

Eade’s talent as a young art school graduate in the mid-1930s was formidable. His portraits are a confident collection of dry daubs, their muted colours creating an autumnal feel which is typical of portraits of the time. Bulky bodies, veiled in diaphanous layers, sit against flattened backdrops with a sense of restless quiet.

By the 1940s the artist’s output was flagging, although there is one small painting, Boy With Parrots, which deserves full attention. It’s a curious, unsettling game of perspectives. A tiled, windowed room is cut through with a line of parrots on perches. Two children haunt the space like ghosts, not quite fitting into the spatial dimensions of this world.

After that, Eade lost his way. The walls are filled with experiments which don’t seem to have any real purpose. There are one or two later hits, notably the semi-abstract Red Pillar Box, and Lovers on Hampstead Heath, a luminous oil painting which clearly relates to his Moore-style sculptures of gently embracing lovers.

Eade’s son explains that the artist’s domineering mother brought him up to believe in himself as “the boy genius”. Eade was tragically ill-prepared for the real world, and the shock it gave him is written all over these walls.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.10.04