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 he lived for the next twelve years, befriending Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Cocteau. In the early 1960s Richardson moved to New York, where he was appointed head of Christie's US operation, and eventually became a full-time writer and editor. He has published books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. The first volume of A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1881-1906, was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread Prize. The second volume of A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1907-1917, was published in 1996. In 1993 Richardson was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where is working on the fourth volume of A Life of Picasso

"Richardson, it hardly needs repeating, is steeped in Picasso and his life (his own friendship with Picasso is the tacit bedrock of this biography) but the arguments he makes are always precise and cogent, never blithely assertive." -- William Boyd The Spectator

• I: Introduction 1: Málaga 2: Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Son and Heir 3: Corunna 4: The Move to Barcelona 5: Sacret Subjects 6: Madrid 1897-98 7: Horta de Ebro 8: Barcelona 1899 9: Els Quatre Gats 10: Yo el Rey 11: First Trip to Paris 12: Madrid 1901 13: Success at Vollard's 14: Painter of Human Misery 15: Barcelona 1902 16: La vie 18: Farewell to Barcelona 19: Montmartre and the Bateau Lavor 20: La Belle Fernande 21: The Apollinaire Period 22: Dealers and Dénicheurs 23: The Absence of Jarry 24: Au Lapin Agile 25: Collectors and Patrons 26: Two or Three Geniuses 27: Plundering the Past 28: Summer at Gósol 29: The Mantle of Gauguin 30: Dionysos II: Family Tree III: Principal Sources IV: Short Titles and Notes V: Index