As an artist content to quietly work away in a shed at his Hampstead home,  it comes as no surprise that Edward Eade isn't as famous as his contemporaries.  But he deserves recognition as an artist of sincerity who helped draw attention to NW3.
  I don't expect you've heard of an artist called Edward Eade.  If you do a thorough search on him on the Internet you only come up with a great deal of genealogy and one web site instigated by a devoted family.  Looking at his work you wonder why he isn't mentioned,  if only as a footnote somewhere.  Perhaps he was an artist so lacking in vanity that to do the work was enough and the world could go hang.  Perhaps he didn't care for the networking and parties which being a "successful artist" frequently entails.  Perhaps he thought his work wasn't good enough.
    Whichever,  Eade was a promising artist who never fulfilled that promise in the eyes of the world.  Even his family have admitted: "Eade was no salesman."  But while he may not have had an agent,  he does have a family who want to see his work - albeit posthumously - out there in the world.
    There was a show last year at Lauderdale House in Highgate,  and the title for his forthcoming show in Edinburgh,  Edward Eade: The Gentle Artist,  was partly inspired by the Ham & High's mention of it and a visitor's comments.  For that is the pervading feeling which runs through his work:  it is all stitched delicately together with  feeling of gentleness and unease, which gives it an edge.
    Yet neither of these two shows would have come about if a landlord had had his way.  In the back garden of the family house in Aberdare Gardens,  West Hampstead,  was Eade's home-made studio.  When he wasn't teaching life drawing or lecturing on the history of art,  he retired to his studio in the shed and entered his own imaginative and gently surreal world.
    Born in 1911 to a working-class family in North London,  he died in 1984,  11 years after his wife,  Phyllis.  His surviving partner lived on in the same house until 1997 when a landlord decided it was time to demolish the shed,  and with it a good deal of work.  The family managed to rescue portfolios and paintings so thick with dust they were thought to be blank.  It took two years to restore the work and another year before the show in Highgate.
    One of the things that has come to light since then,  says the artist's son,  Dr Oliver Eade,  is a work reference from 1961 by his near contemporary and professor at the Royal College of Art,  Carel Weight.  Even allowing for the puffing out of a reference it is generous.  But considering that even Weight's work has hardly been universally lauded,  what chance does one E.Eade stand?  However,  the draughtsmanship that Weight applauds in his reference is certainly there in his conventional life studies.  And following Eade's training at the slade and the RA,  he obviously made an inspiring teacher of both life drawing and history of art.  He taught at Hornsey College and a number of different art schools.
    It is in his paintings,  with its restless playing with style and paint itself that his character comes through.  All you can say is there is something about them.  From faux-naif works to paintings with a Nash-like surrealism or Bonnard-like diffusion of light,  they recall all sorts of painters' work and yet no one,  overwhelmingly,  in particular.
    Hampstead features regularly in his work. In Lovers At Hampstead Heath,  a naked couple sit like Adam and Eve on a park bench in an Eden made of yellow lollipop trees surrounded by leaves the acid green of early spring. Blue Tree is a characteristically off kilter work in a Hampstead-like setting,  while his street scene,  Hampstead,  London,  has an undeniable influence of Weight.
    It is the mix of sweetness and tension which gives the work its strength.  And the mix of the ordinary and extraordinary which gives the work its otherness.  One painting is called Explain The Lions.  A woman is holding on to a screaming child in a garden or park-like setting.  In front of them are four large lions - two sitting on their hind legs,  one yawning,  one lying down glaring at the child as a prospective supper.  Explain them?  I can't.  Nor can I explain his image of two leopards sprawled across a street in Brighton.
    What doesn't need explanation is the feeling of gentleness though,  in the portraits of mother and child or lovers.  It may be deeply unfashionable to portray something so revealing and sincere but it gives the images a subtle quality,  which is also evident in his observations of light.
    In Thames Sunset a barge makes its way past the upturned table legs of Battersea Power Station.  In thick strokes he beautifully describes the dying light from the huge yellow sun splintering across the surface of the concrete river.
    Eade strongly believed that if art had any meaning,  it should transcend the vulgar and the ugly.  In this he succeeded,  working from his small garden shed in West Hampstead.