John Richardson has written books on Manet and Braque, and has been a contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The first volume of his Life of Picasso won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1991. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994 - 95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. He lives between Conneticut and New York City.

"John Richardson's second volume on Picasso confirms what his first suggested: that this is a masterpiece in the making, the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century visual artist... A continuous pleasure to read" -- Robert Hughes "Magisterial...Richardson's ambitious project dwarfs all previous biographies of Picasso... [He] has a gift for telling pen-portraits and makes vivid an entire gallery of pioneering dealers and early collectors." -- Frances Spalding Sunday Times "Richardson covers [the] momentous ten years from 1907 to the end of the First World War with great elegance and quiet authority... What makes the two published volumes so outstanding is the sense of Picasso the man emerging - in all his complexity - alongside the superb analysis of Picasso the artist" -- William Boyd Spectator