John Richardson was born in London in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to France, where befriended Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Cocteau. The first volume of his magisterial four-volume A Life of Picasso won the Whitbread Prize in 1991. He was also the author of the memoir, The Sorcerer's Apprentice; an essay collection, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters; and books on Manet and Braque. He wrote for the New York Review of Books, New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1993, and served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University from 1995 to 1996. He died in 2019.
