Youth and education John Patrick Richardson was born on 6 February 1924 in
London, England, the elder son of Sir
Wodehouse Richardson, Quarter-Master General in the
Boer War, and founder of the
Army & Navy Stores. His mother was Patty (née Crocker); he had a younger sister (b. 1925) and a younger brother. In 1929, when he was five years old, his father died, and his mother sent him to board at two successive preparatory schools, where he was unhappy. When he was thirteen, he became a boarder at
Stowe School, where he admired the architecture and landscape and was taught something about the work of Picasso and other innovative painters. By 1939, and the outbreak of
World War II, Richardson knew that he wanted to become an artist, and, a month short of seventeen, enrolled at the
Slade School of Fine Art (at that time evacuated to Oxford), where he became a friend of
Geoffrey Bennison and
James Bailey. When he was
called up for military service, he obtained a position in the
Irish Guards, but almost immediately contracted
rheumatic fever and was invalided out of the army. During this period he met and made friends with
Francis Bacon and
Lucian Freud, both of whom later painted portraits of him. He spent the rest of the war with his mother and siblings in London. During daytime, he worked as an industrial designer before becoming a reviewer for
The New Observerp. A homosexual, in 1949 he became acquainted with art historian and collector
Douglas Cooper, with whom he would share his life for the next ten years.
Liaison with Douglas Cooper Richardson moved to
Provence in the
south of France in 1952, when
Douglas Cooper acquired the Château de Castille in the vicinity of
Avignon and transformed the run-down castle into a private museum of early
Cubism. Cooper had been at home in the Paris art scene before World War II and had been active in the art business as well; by building his own collection, he also met many artists personally and introduced them to his friend. Richardson became a close friend of Picasso,
Léger and
de Staël as well. During this period of his life he developed an interest in Picasso's portraits and contemplated creating a publication; more than 20 years later, these plans expanded into his four-part Picasso biography
A Life of Picasso, the final volume of which was published in 2022.
New York In 1960, Richardson left Cooper and moved to New York City, where he organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective in 1962 and a
Braque retrospective in 1964. Christie's, the auction house, then appointed him to open their US office, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973, he joined New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as Vice President in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later became Managing Director of
Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art. In 1980, Richardson decided to devote all his time to writing. Besides working on his Picasso biography, he was a contributor to
The New York Review of Books,
The New Yorker and
Vanity Fair. In 1993, Richardson was elected to the
British Academy and in 1995 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford. The fourth volume was originally to span the early 1930s to the
liberation of Paris in 1944. Though the fourth volume fell behind schedule (it was to be published by
Alfred A. Knopf in 2014), Richardson spoke of still progressing with it in a February 2016 interview with
Alain Elkann. Richardson stated then that he was working daily, "even weekends", on the project with three assistants who were aiding him with writing and research. He stated that he was "up to 1939", and that he hoped to "get through the war". The fourth volume, covering Picasso's life until 1943 was eventually published posthumously in November 2021. Fifteen years after Cooper's death, Richardson published a memoir (''The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper
) in 1999 and a collection of essays in 2001 (Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters
). He was curator of an exhibition of the late Picasso with title Mosqueteros
in the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. For the London Gagosian Gallery, he curated another such exhibition in 2010: Picasso - The Mediterranean Years (1945-1962)'', which ran from 4 June until 28 August 2010. In 2011, Richardson and
Diana Widmaier Picasso co-curated another sizable Picasso exhibition, "Picasso and
Marie-Thérèse: L'amour fou", at the Gagosian gallery in New York City for which Richardson also wrote a related book. Also in 2011, Richardson was awarded France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his contributions to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. Richardson was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the
2012 New Year Honours for services to art.
Death Richardson died in New York City on 12 March 2019, at the age of 95. ==Bibliography==