Edward James

WORK IN PROGRESS

Edward James (1907-1984) was an eccentric, a poet, an art collector and an early patron of the Surrealist movement. He was the illegitimate grandson of King Edward VII. He As a multi-millionaire, he gave support to such Surrealist artists as the young Dali and Magritte, Leonora Carrington and others, when they were still unknown. Salvador Dali’s 1937 Swans Reflecting Elephants contains a full-figure portrait of James on the left facing the cliffs.

At the age of 25, James inherited his parents’ estate, West Dean, in the county of Sussex in Southern England, where he lived for many years and which today houses an art academy. In the former hunting cottage, Monkton House in West Dean Park, James set up home in bizarre surroundings. Dali and James created the famous Mae-West Sofa; on a small table stood the lobster telephone; the bedroom was home to a bed in the shape of a coffin; the bathroom had transparent walls, and woven into the carpet on the stairs were footprints of his wife, the revue dancer, Tilly Losch. Following their divorce, he had her footprints in the carpet replaced with pawprints from his favourite dog.  

During the Second World War, James emigrated to Los Angeles, where he met with other war-driven emigrants, such as Dalí, Man Ray, Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc  and Isamu Noguchi, as well as Aldous Huxley, Gerald Herad and Christopher Isherwood.  James wanted to create a Garden of Eden and set about fulfilling his greatest Surrealist dream in Las Pozas, in the middle of the Mexican rain forest, where he took an enchanted jungle settlement and turned it into a private park, taking Surrealist architecture to a new level.  After having spent 25 years building with the help of over one hundred indigenous workers in the Mexican jungle, Edward James constructed his final place of residence on the Riviera, on the border between Italy and France. Casa Dante was his last fantastic building.
Edward James died in 1984 in a sanatorium not far from the house, in San Remo.