John Richardson was born in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School. In 1949 he moved to Southern France, where he and Douglas Cooper, the collector, bought and transformed the Chateau de Castille near Avignon into a private museum of cubist painting. For the next ten years he lived in France, where he became a friend of Picasso, Braque, Leger and Cocteau, and embarked on an analytical study of Picasso's work, now part of this biography.
In the early 1960s Richardson went to live in New York, where was appointed head of Christie's. He organised various exhibitions, including a major Picasso retrospective in 1962. He is the author of books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor toThe New York Review of BooksandVanity Fair.